I am in the process of learning workflows in SAP, and thought of documenting couple of workflow administration transactions that are pretty useful. If you are interested in learning more about workflows, consider this book. Its the one I am using and find it very useful.
Reporting on Workflow Progress
| Workflows For Objects | SWI6 |
| Workflows for Object Type | SWI4 |
Reporting on Workflow Performance
| Work Items by processing duration | SWI2_DURA |
| Work Items with monitored Deadlines | SWI2_DEAD |
| Number of work items processed per period | SWI2_FREQ |
| Work Load analysis for agents | SWI5 |
Support tools for Agent Determination problems
| Execute rules for work items | SWI1_RULE |
| List of work items without agents (Orphaned Work items) | SWI2_ADMI |
| Execute work items without agent check | SWIA |
Resolving Buffering errors (The Cinderella Principle)
The SAP system buffers/keeps a copy of different data in memory to improve overall performance. This is particularly prevalent in organizational management related entities like Org Units, Jobs, Positions, agents, tasks and relationships between them. Buffering problems can also occur when there is a change in task definition, or after transporting new workflows or versions of workflows into a system.
The buffering while important for system performance, may cause issues in the over all working of workflows. Typically, the system refreshes its buffer every midnight. So, the problems caused may be temporary. Its not uncommon to work on an issue all day, and come back the next day to find the problem does not even exist!!!. More frustrating is the realization that what ever changes/tries you made the previous day, in an attempt to “fix” the issue have to be reversed.
The above scenario is called “Midnight Magic” or the “Cinderella Principle” (i.e.) everything back to normal after midnight.
Solution to the above problem is either to wait a day, or more practically, synchronize the run time buffer.
To synchronize the runtime buffer, use the transaction : SWU_OBUF
After executing the above transaction, some workflow functions may have a performance hit. But this performance hit will go away, as the buffers are rebuild.
Some More Support Tools
| Diagnosis of workflows with errors | SWI2_DIAG |
| Deadline monitoring for work items. This transaction is useful to control the working of background job which monitors deadlines. | SWWA |
| Background job/report that monitors work item start or end steps | RSWWICOND |
| Continue workflow after system crash | SWPC |
