SAP Notes: first things first

If something strange is happening in SAP System, do not hesitate to look for a SAP Note firstly. This post is based on my own experience.

Certain company had an Invoice Management Application implemented in SAP. It was a customized solution that, among other things, sent the invoices to the assigned approvers using the workflow definition. This application had an Adminitration Module that allowed to add and delete approvers and then, reassigned to the new approver the invoices that was pending for the preceding approver. This action resent the workitem to the new approver. Although, something strange happened at midnight: the workitems just disappeared from the inbox of the new reassigned approvers. 

As a workaround, by the mornings we executed SWI5 transaction in order to get the workitems pending to the approvers, and then executed SWIA transaction with the workitems retrieved in the previous step, chosen the username and resent the selected workitems to the new approvers.

I started analyzing the issue and as it was not a standard solution by SAP, the first thing I thought was checking the jobs that were executed at night. There were some jobs defined but none of them impacted on this issue. In addition, I debugged the program that reassigned the invoice to the new approver, review the workflow definitions, and also reviewed the application customized tables in order to find out what was occurring, but with no success.

As this issue was very urgent, time was short and we needed to find a solution as soon as we could, a colleague, and also a friend of mine, David Eduardo Cortelezzi, was implicated and he would continue analyzing it in order to gain time, since his journey was after mine. Furthermore, he was hand-picked because he is very good technically and he uses to solve complex issues. So, I explained to him the problem, all the items that I had checked before and also gave him an example on integration environment. 

On the second day that he was working on this issue, he sent me a message telling me the good news: he could find the solution on a SAP Note, specifically the “SAP Note 1308276 - WF: Forwarded work items are not displayed in the inbox”. This note indicates that the field SWWUSERWI-NO_EXECUTE is set incorrectly to 'X' for the forwarded workitems. 

SWWUSERWI Table

After applying it and then executing SWU_OBUF transaction in order to refresh the organizational environment, the workitems were displayed again on the corresponding SAP Inbox. I was truly very grateful to David and according to him, all my previous analysis was indispensable to help him to find the solution (I do want to believe on that).

So, after this episode, I always search a SAP Note firstly. As we use to say in Spanish “lo primero es lo primero”.

Sorry “Saint David”, but it was impossible not mention you on this post. I really admire you professionally and the passion you have for technology.

Just a parenthesis, when implementing a SAP Note, sometimes it displays a popup asking to choose a main program and here comes the doubt... wich program should I choose? In this case, all we have to do is dobleclicking in one of the programs, it does not matter which one. SNote will pick the right one.

Auf Wiedersehen! I have learned this expression today in my Deutsche class and it means Goodbye or, the famous phrase in Spanish, ¡Hasta la vista!