Reporting on Workflow performance

Question

Hi,
The business is trying to gain an insight in to how long the process is from the time we create a Shopping Cart to the time it is approved. 
Ideally they are looking for the following:
1) Time taken from Shopping Cart Creation > Financial Approval is carried out;
2) Time taken from Financial Approval > Group Procurement Approval;
2) Time taken for the Shopping Cart Creation > Shopping Cart fully approved (both Financial & Group Procurement)
This would enable us to monitor and report on the process and look for process improvements (if we need to).
I have shown them the SWI2_DURA report, but they want a custom report written that is more user-friendly. I've been tasked with analysing whether we can get a report created.
Can you let me know how difficult this would be?
Chers,
John

Answer 1

Hi,
You could create an abap report but my experience is that you will need to read the workflow container (perhaps even several times) (sap_wapi_read_container for instance). The performance will be very poor.
A solution to this can perhaps be to add an activity to the workflowmodel which creates a record with certain fields in a z-table. Then your abap will only need to read the z-table.
Also have a look at programming exits. Each task in the workflowmodel has this tab. You can enter a class which creates the record. It is intended for this purpose. Look for classes cl_swh_workitem_exit* for demo classes from SAP.
regards,
Bert