I recently explored ‘stacking’ approval maps to address a customer’s business process requirement. The use case is to allow all approvers to be notified and move specific documents, such as Purchase Orders or AR Invoices, through approval ASAP. For starter, the steps in an approval map work sequentially. This results in one user (or workgroup) being notified when a step is triggered but approvers in subsequent steps will not be notified until preceding conditions have been satisfied. In other words, the customer wants the notification to reach different teams at the same time.
Let us examine a purchase order with a sizeable amount for a project and approval required from 3 different groups – Project Management, Accounting and Executives.
The first step is to build approval maps for each of the 3 groups, keeping in mind their internal dynamics and reporting structures. To illustrate this, I setup 2 steps in PO approval for the project management group.
Next, make sure that each step has a condition to Always execute the step. In addition, rule actions for each step should be set to Collect All Approvals from This Step.
The last step is to add all 3 PO approval maps in Purchase Order Preferences > Approval for the PO type that requires these approvals.
Here is a test PO for $250,000 where approvers from the 3 approval maps are listed concurrently.
Remember the PM approval map has 2 steps? After approval by the PM, the director is added to the approval details. This demonstrates approval map can be concurrent and sequential.
I hope this helped to illustrate how to reach different groups at the same time by ‘stacking’ the approval maps. If you have any questions or need any help feel free to contact us here at Central Nervous Systems.
Eric.