Step-by-step approach , how AARINI Consulting used SAP Intelligent Business Process Management (iBPM) to automate the Employee Offboarding.
First let me start with explaining what iBPM is
SAP Intelligent Business Process Management is a combination of existing and new capabilities. SAP Intelligent BPM ties together end to end capabilities to provide customers with a solution for automating and optimizing their business processes. It enables customers to analyze existing processes, reinvent them, create brand new business approaches, enable users to make dynamic ad-hoc changes (backed up by documented models) and allow for unique choregraphed processes (personalization) at scale. This means that SAP Intelligent BPM can deliver on rapid improvements of customer and employee journeys. Ultimately, delivering on the ability for a customer to automate, orchestrate and choregraph business processes that manage themselves as they run. This means that companies can execute the best next action and are no longer tied to a repeatable sequence of events.
In this use case we focused on digitizing and automating the Onboarding / Offboarding process using SFEC (Successfactors Employee Central) with iBPM.
When you start your professional career, you all have to go through Employee Onboarding process which includes contract signing, background verification etc. Similarly when you leave an organization, you have to go through certain clearance procedures (IT Clearance, Finance Clearance, HR Clearance etc). After this clearance, the employee should get their experience certificate. In most of the organizations, these processes are manual, quite complex and not seamlessly integrated with the core Employee Central System. In this article you can see how Aarini Consulting simplified the Employee Off boarding Clearance process using SFEC, SAP Intelligent BPM and DocuSign. Also you can see how we haven built an extension on SAP Cloud Platform without touching the existing core process and system.
Business Story
ABC is a US based company who recently Implemented Intelligent Enterprise Total Workforce Management which includes the SAP Hire to Retire Business Process. ABC Company use SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central for Employee On-boarding and Off boarding. Bryan Adams is an operational manager of Company ABC who is going to leave the organization. During the exit process, every employee needs to go through a certain clearance, also Bryan has to pass this clearance. Bryan’s employer implemented SAP Intelligent BPM based extension to handle this all clearance which makes process simpler and improves the employee off-boarding experience. Because Bryan doesn’t have to do anything, except just clearing all the clearance by submitting all the employer’s asset/bills, the remaining part will be done automatically by SAP iBPM. No manual interference and follow-up needed. The best part is that once all the clearances are approved, it automatically triggers a DocuSign based digitally signed experience letter.
Architecture
Technical Explanation
Let’s deep dive into the above architecture and give a further explanation. First a HR person initiate the termination request in SFEC. Once the termination request gets approved, a termination event is being triggered and a SFEC Intelligence Service triggers a node.js application with the corresponding employee, business unit and company code information. This node.js application is deployed in SAP Cloud Platform Cloud Foundry which will call the Business Rules service to gather all the clearances from the approvers. It will then call SAP Cloud Platform Workflow Service, in order to initiate a clearance workflow. Once all clearances (IT, Finance, Asset and HR) are cleared, it will call DocuSign (Open Connectors based) API to issue the Experience letter Digitally Signed by the Chief HR.
** Let’s break it into smaller pieces, so we can understand it in detail and then finally connect all the dots together.
Breaking it into smaller pieces
Step 1. Configure the Intelligence Service for Employee Termination.
Choose the Intelligent Services as the Trigger Type, REST as Destination Type, SuccessFactors as Source Type and JSON as Format.
In next screen select the event Employment Termination
Create payload with JSON as below
Configure the Destination with deployed Node.js Application into SAP Cloud Platform, which will get the Employee information in the same JSON format as the input. Call Business Rules Service to get the Approvers and trigger Workflow. (Node.Js, Workflow and Business Rules will be covered in next steps). Now save this.
Step 2. Design the Business Rules for Getting all Approvers
As I mentioned earlier these Business Rules will be used for getting the Clearance Approver details, based on the Business Unit, Company Code and Division.
employmentInfo is the Input Structure
EmpApprovers is the result structure or ‘output structure’
This is how the Vocabulary or Rule service looks like
And here is sample decision table GettingApprover rule in which is used for this demo
For this scenario we have only one rule in Rulesets
Step 3. Design the Clearance Workflow using SAP Cloud Platform Workflow
Mission 1 – Creating Workflow project and Its Module in Cloud Foundry
Mission 2 – Add user task to Workflow and Deploy it as MTA Application
Below is how the Workflow is created for this scenario
Herewith a sample context of Workflow in code, so it would be clear to everyone
Herewith a sample context of Workflow in code, so it would be clear to everyone
This context is being created by a Node.Js Application ( Which we are going to discuss in next step) after calling Business Rules Service (For getting the Approver Details based on company code, Division and Business Unit).
So the first script task (Setting Titles) is being used for creating a subject of each user task (e.g. Finance Clearance)
In this scenario we needed a parallel gateway, because we need approval from each department. Until all the user tasks get cleared we cannot move to next step. In order to read the decision from each user task (Finance, HR, IT, Asset), we need to add a script task after each user task.
The final decision script task is being used to determine the final decision and adding it into context node, based on each user task decision.
After this we need an exclusive gateway in order to make the if-else branch. So if the final decision is approved, it will move to the DocusignService Task, which will trigger the Docusign Application (Node.js based wrapper) to generate a digitally signed experience Letter.
Below the DocuSign Service task details
Below the Destination Configuration used in the Docusign Service Task
Step 4: Creating Node.Js Application for Fetching Approver Details by Calling Business Rules Service and Initiate Clearance Workflow
Step 5. Create a Sandbox account in DocuSign and design the experience letter template.
This is the sample experience letter we have used for this demo.
Step 6. Creating Open Connectors instance for DocuSign.
Step 7. Creating Wrapper Node.Js Application for calling the Open Connector based DocuSign API, which will be called from the Service Task of Workflow.
Interested in Intelligent Business Process Management in your Organization?
Please PM or contact me on:
max.backer@aarini.eu
