In most business processes, the time involved in the actual processing of the data is only a fraction of the total time, from start to finish, that it takes to complete the transaction. Most of the processing time is consumed by the movement of the data from person to person, and in the "waiting to be worked on" phase.

SAP Business Workflow provides you with the infrastructure and tools that enable you to manage your human resources and business processes efficiently. It gets the data quickly to the right person even if that person is in a different office, or a different country and makes it easy for approvers to deal with the transaction and send it on to the next step.

SAP Business Workflow enables you to define business processes according to your company-specific rules, models or organizational standards. You can monitor the workflow and view information on the current status of a task or work item at any point. You can see who is doing what and check work load distribution, identifying capacity problems or work overload before it becomes a problem. And with the SAP highly sophisticated workflow, approvers can indicate total or partial approval of transactions in the same approval process.

SAP Business Workflow is built into SAP HR, not a "bolted on" third party product. This means that workflow taps the inherent power of SAP HR without separate maintenance schedules or synchronization issues. Whenever you make a change to your organization, the changes are automatically reflected in workflow. And since SAP Business Workflow is position-based, instead of person-based, you don't have to update your workflow routes every time an employee changes jobs. With SAP Business Workflow, you can automate a number of processes. To name just a few:

• Submitting application forms
• Planning and holding interviews
• Drawing up job offers
• Monitoring rejected applications
• Processing absence approvals
• Approving travel requests
• Following up on new hire activities
• Reviewing time entries
• Reviewing and approving expense reports

Workflow will make your company's human resources organization more effective by incorporating one routing structure for all processes across all applications throughout the company, anywhere in the world.