Multiple levels escalation for deadline monitoring

Question

Hi all,
We have a business requirement to perform multiple levels escalation in one of the workflow steps. If the approver does not approve the work item(WI) after one day,  a mail notification will be sent to the approver.  A second mail will be sent again if approver still doesn't approve WI after 48 hours.  Then the third/fourth mail will be sent to approver and approver's boss if approver still doesn't approve WI after 72 / 96 hours.  The fifth mail will be sent to approver's boss's boss if WI is not approved still after 5 days.
I know how to do simple and modeled deadline monitoring in workflow builder. But I don't know whether our business requirement can be achieved in workflow builder( and this is a step in dynamic parallel processing).  Other option I have is to create an ABAP report to go through the table stores workflow run time data and make this report run several times a day in the batch to send mail notification reminder.
Did anybody have a similar business requirement like ours? What's the best way to handle it - build it in workflow builder or write an ABAP report?
Thank you in advance,
Merta

Answer 1

Hi Merta,
We had a similar requirement and this is how I achieved it:
1.  Pleace your approval task into a loop (while not approved) and create a container element as the approval flag.  This allows you to get out of the loop when the item has been correctly actioned.  Also create a DL element to hold your calculated deadline value;
2.  Create a method and task to determine the next escalation point based on how many loop passes the instance has had, ie:
     Pass 1 - DL = sy-datum + 1 day;
     Pass 2 - DL = DL1 + 1 day, and so on.
3.  Create a method to determine who should get what.  Link this to a condition so you know whether to send a mail or escalate the entire workitem.  Create the notification as a send mail within the condition;
4.  Change the Deadline parameters in your step to "Refer.date/tim" = Expression and bind the DL element;
5.  Set the processing obsolete property to ensure the workitem is killed when a new pass (and therefore and new deadline/agent etc) is started.
See the following:
This one handles the loop/obsolete concept.
http://help.sap.com/saphelp_47x200/helpdata/en/c5/e4b97e453d11d189430000e829fbbd/frameset.htm
http://help.sap.com/saphelp_47x200/helpdata/en/bc/ecdd5ad24e11d2b494006094b9ea0d/frameset.htm
Regards
Gareth