In this blog I will explain the difference between SAP Task center and SAP Workflow Management. This blog will help customers understand for which use case they should implement SAP Workflow Management and for which one SAP Task Center would be the better choice.

What is SAP Workflow Management :- 

SAP Workflow Management is a cloud service offering to digitize workflows, automate business processes, manage decision logic, and gain end to end process visibility supporting simple workflows to more complex and composite workflows. A business process is a defined sequence of connected workflows, activities, and tasks designed to achieve a particular result.

SAP Process Automation solution is an AI-powered, intuitive, and no-code solution that combines SAP workflow management with SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation which provides a simpler and faster way to automate business processes and provide an end to end automation.

Benefits of SAP Workflow Management :- 

• Enhance productivity with coordinated and accountable tasks.
• Rapidly build and modify workflow applications with web-based tooling.
• Tailor your business process by extending cloud-based applications and workflows like extending SAP S/4HANA Cloud application with workflow as well as extend non-SAP Cloud application.
• Flexibility to adapt to new requirement: tailor your business process to business needs and support new business models and fix broken business processes.

What challenges does SAP Workflow Management help the business overcome :- 

• Complex business processes that are in silos
• Workflow and Processes are manual.
• Automate and reduce error which occur due to manual paper-based workflows and decision.

Sample Use-cases :-

• Manage Credit Block on sales document types such as Sales orders, Credit Memo Request, and Debit Memo Request. Review sales documents which are credit block and decide whether to release or reject it.
• Automate and manage the approval of sales orders in SAP S/4HANA with validations and approvals
• Purchase requisition approval or release
• Approval of a vacation request

What is SAP Task Center :-

SAP Task Center provides a central inbox service for workflow tasks of SAP solutions. SAP products comes with their individual workflow inboxes. This led to an inconsistent user experience and made work unnecessarily inefficient because tasks had to be checked at multiple different places and for the way how information was presented, e.g., actions like “Accept”, “Reject” etc., differed.

SAP Task center is provided to an end user via the SAP Launchpad service on SAP Business Technology Platform . If the end user launches the SAP Task Center application, the web application opens and a task overview of all assigned tasks from the different connected systems is displayed.

Various SAP Cloud solutions are now connected to the SAP Business Technology Platform Task Center service via a so-called Service Provider Interface. The SAP Task Center service retrieves relevant approval events and pushes them to the Task Center Fiori based UI or to the mobile app which is a part of SAP Mobile start where the responsible personas can easily execute on them

SAP Task Center : Task for different SAP applications like Concur, Ariba, Field Glass, SAP S/4HANA consolidated into a central solution

Benefits of SAP Task Center :- 

• Reduce the time spent by users navigating through various systems and finding items that require their approval or attention
• Improve the approval or completion time for critical items (that e.g., impact business operations if not approved on time)
• Improve the quality and consistency of approvals

What challenges does SAP Task Center help the business overcome?

• Multiple User-experience
• Approval tasks scattered across multiple inboxes since every application comes with its own approval inbox.

When to Use SAP Task Center and SAP Workflow Management :-

• SAP task center provides a single inbox to approve arbitrary workflows. An approval or reject step in a task center can be thought of as a single step or task of a bigger workflow that needs to be performed by a human or an automated system
• A task center provides a user with a single view of all approvals comings from SAP thereby providing the customer with a central inbox to manage all their approvals from different systems
• Whereas SAP Workflow management provides end-to-end visibility and helps users digitize and automate business process.

Relevant Educational Sessions:-

• Here is the list of upcoming webinar around SAP Process Automation which covers SAP Workflow Management and SAP Robotic Process Automation, SAP Work Zone and SAP Task Center

Additional Information :-

SAP Task Center : https://help.sap.com/docs/TASK_CENTER

SAP Workflow Management    : sap.com | Video | Infographic | Solution Brief | Roadmap

SAP Discovery Center | Tutorial | Booster