Return to Workflow Building Block Overview
A Workflow is a systematic and organized sequence of tasks designed to accomplish a specific goal involving the processing or transformation of data from its initial stage to its completion.
The Workflow enhances the efficiency of gathering planning data by limiting report writing permissions to specific time intervals and authorized users. End users can input and revise planning data exclusively within workflow activities, but not outside of them. As a result, key users control modification and ensure data integrity.
The Workflow also distinguishes between data entry and approval activities.
Currently, the Workflow building block is integrated into the following models:
Financial Consolidation,
You can integrate Workflow into any custom application with the necessary criteria, namely three dimensions to fulfill these respective roles: the Version dimension, the Time dimension, and the Workflow Step dimension.
Workflow collects data sets, which appear as workflow tasks in the Workflow Administration report. Each workflow task is defined by its business process, version, and time frame (a single year, in most cases). Examples could be:
- Inventory Actual 2019
- Inventory Budget 2015
- Inventory Forecast 3+9 2017-2018
Note: workflow tasks must be created in advance when workflow is used to collect data sets for specific versions or years.
Workflow tasks are broken down further by the workflow step dimension and the associated workflow activities.
The Workflow Wizard empowers key users to efficiently manage workflow tasks, allowing them to assign activities to specific user groups, establish due dates, and configure email templates. When an activity is activated, email notifications are automatically sent to all end users within the corresponding user groups.
The workflow system maintains real-time awareness of task completion and the current status of defined processes. It also generates a comprehensive log file that captures user interactions and comments on individual workflow steps and activities.
To become acquainted with the Workflow functionality, you can install the Workflow Building Block model along with its sample configuration and explore its setup. For additional details, please refer to: Getting Started with the Workflow Building Block.
The following definitions are helpful when working with workflow features:
| Name | Description |
| Step Dimension |
The pivotal force in the workflow is the step dimension, responsible for decomposing tasks into manageable steps. It can be likened to a tool that dissects extensive data sets into more digestible portions (for example, the Region dimension breaks down into countries, districts, and so on). More importantly, however, the step dimension controls the recipiency of these packages, assigning certain activities to certain user groups and thereby streamlining the workflow process. For workflow functionality, a dimension defined as a step dimension for a workflow must have a default read element. The aggregation weight in the workflow step dimension must be 1. Parts of the Workflow will not work with other weights (such as 0 or -1). |
| Workflow Step | A single workflow activity dependent on elements of the Step Dimension (in the case of the Region dimension, this means that there is an activity that needs to be executed for each Region in the Region dimension). |
| Workflow Task (_WF Task) | The sequence of workflow steps executed by different users, e.g., business process including data collection. All workflow steps execute the same procedure for each element of the step dimension. |
| Workflow Task Dimension (_WF Task) | _WF Task Dimension and _WF Task Dimension in Custom Applications |
| Workflow Subtask | Every workflow task can integrate another workflow task as a subtask. |
| Workflow Type |
The sequence of activities to execute a workflow step. See the _WF Activity Dimension article for an overview of the available workflow types. Note that |
| Workflow Name | The Workflow name: there are no restrictions for selecting the workflow name. In the Financial Consolidation model, the following naming convention is used in the sample data: Process Version Date, e.g., Consolidation Actual 2020-12_YTD. |
| Workflow Wizard Report | Web report for workflow definitions and modifications. See the article Workflow Wizard. |
| Slice | Workflow Name, Time Dimension, and Version Dimension define a slice |
| Workflow Activity | There are two types of activities: User activities and System activities. The first ones are executed manually by users, and the second ones are automated, e.g., Configuration Validation, Data Validation, Data Collection. System activities are only implemented for the Financial Consolidation model. |
Updated March 19, 2024