Concept: Order of Execution

You can specify the order in which certain items occur within a business process, including:

Order is set by entering one or more alphanumeric characters in the order column. We recommend using letters, because Workday sorts numbers sequentially, not numerically; 10 sorts before 2.

Workday enforces the English language for workflow step display and processing.

Lower-case letters display below their upper-case versions, but Workday processes business process steps with the same letters in parallel, in any order, regardless of letter case. Workday completes all parallel steps before starting the next step.

In business processes, the

Initiation

step is always a lower-case

a

. Edit the

Order

fields to use only character strings starting with

b

through

z

(upper- or lower-case). Using an upper-case

A

(or any numbers or special characters) generates a warning that the

Initiation

step must be the only first step.

Use the same string for business process steps that can be completed in parallel. Order of completion for business process steps with the same string doesn't matter, except that they must all be complete before the next step can start. For condition rules, don’t specify steps with the same character strings in the

Order

column.

You can skip letters. Example: Order designation of a, b, c, d, f is fine.

If you add an item with 2 letters, such as ca, it runs after step c. You can use as many letters as you want to insert separate steps. Use this method to insert a step without having to change the order designation of subsequent steps. Example: a, b, c, ca, cb, cc, d....