There are two enhancements that would make Anaplan Workflow much easier to use, especially when dealing with more complex business processes.
1. Ability to loop back to any of the previous steps
Currently, we can create branches based on a decision task, but there is no option to go back to an earlier step in the workflow.
For example:
Submit → Review → Decision
If the request is approved, the workflow can continue to Approval. But if it is rejected and needs some changes, we may want to send it back to the Review step after the correction.
Approved → Approval → End
Rejected → Correction → Review
At the moment, we need to create additional branches and duplicate steps to achieve this. This can make the workflow unnecessarily large and difficult to maintain, particularly when there can be multiple rounds of review and correction.
It would be useful to have a "Return to Step" or looping option where we can select an existing step as the destination based on the decision.
2. Ability to create a workflow from an existing template
Another useful enhancement would be the ability to save an already-created workflow as a template and use it when creating a new workflow.
In many cases, different business processes follow a similar structure. Having to create the same tasks, decisions, and branches from scratch each time can be time-consuming.
For example, if we have already created a workflow for a review and approval process, we should be able to reuse it for another process, with the option to call it after or before the required steps.
This would help with:
- Reducing the effort required to build similar workflows
- Avoiding duplicate work
- Maintaining consistency across workflows
- Making complex workflows easier to maintain
- Supporting processes that require multiple review and correction cycles
Having both workflow looping and reusable workflow templates would make Workflow considerably more flexible and practical for real-world business processes.
