We recently upgraded our SAP PLM system to 2020 version and now our BOM change management workflow (SWDD) is completely broken. Changes to BOMs are not triggering approval workflows at all - they just sit in a pending state indefinitely.
Before the upgrade, everything worked perfectly. Now when engineers submit BOM changes through the standard change request process, the workflow should route to the appropriate approvers based on material type and change scope, but nothing happens. We’ve verified the workflow template is still active in SWDD, but it seems like the agent determination logic isn’t firing.
I suspect this might be related to custom BAdIs or user exits we had implemented for routing logic, but I’m not sure if SAP PLM 2020 deprecated any of these enhancement points. Has anyone encountered similar issues after upgrading? Our production BOM changes are completely blocked and causing significant delays in our engineering release process.
You were right about the BAdI! I found dumps in ST22 showing parameter mismatches in our custom implementation. The BAdI signature changed and our Z-implementation wasn’t compatible anymore. I can see the error occurring during workflow agent determination:
Error: Type mismatch in BADI_WF_APPROV_AGENTS->GET_AGENTS
Expected: IT_AGENTS TYPE SWRAGENT_T
Received: IT_AGENTS TYPE SWRAGENT (old structure)
Looks like I need to update our custom BAdI implementation to match the new interface definition. Any tips on the specific changes needed for SAP PLM 2020 compatibility?
Thanks for the quick response. I verified SWDD and the template version looks correct - it’s marked as active with the right version number. However, when I checked SWU3, I noticed several steps showing yellow status instead of green. The ‘Maintain Responsible Agents’ section specifically has warnings. Could this be the root cause?
I had the exact same issue last year. Beyond the standard configuration, check if you have any custom BAdIs implementing BADI_WF_APPROV_AGENTS or similar enhancement spots. SAP PLM 2020 changed how some of these BAdI interfaces work - specifically the importing and exporting parameters were restructured.
Your custom code might be throwing silent exceptions that prevent agent determination from completing. Check transaction ST22 for any recent dumps related to workflow processing.
The structure change is straightforward but critical. In SAP PLM 2020, the agent table type changed from flat structure to a more complex nested structure to support additional approval scenarios and multi-level routing. You need to update your BAdI implementation to use the new table type and adjust how you populate the agent list. I’ve seen several organizations miss this during upgrades because the syntax check passes but runtime fails.