How do I setup parallel approvals?

Title and music.

Hello! In this video, I’ll explain parallel approvals and how you can set them up.

Let’s begin by looking at what’s parallel approval.

Typically, the approval flow is sequential in nature where a task is routed up a supervisory chain from one approver to another.

But sometimes there’s a need to send parallel notifications to multiple participants.

Let’s take a look at where you can set up rules to notify parallel participants in the Setup and Maintenance work area.

You can use the Manage Approval Transactions for Human Capital Management task.

In the Approval Rules tab you can access a task and begin updating the rules for the participant type.

You can also use the Manage Task Configurations for Human Capital Management task.

Navigate to the Assignee tab on the BPM Worklist to configure the rules.

There are two ways to set up parallel approvals.

When you select First Responder Wins, the first approver response on the task serves as the response for all approvers.

In this example, John submits his vacation request. Several managers are assigned for approval.

The first manager to respond can approve or reject the request.

When you select Vote Outcome, you can set the target percentage.

You can enter the Approve % amount as 75 where 3 out of 4 approvers need to approve.

And the Reject % amount, such that 25 percent of the approvers can reject the task and it will still be approved.

In this example, Linda Swift submits a promotion for her direct report, Andrew Robinson. All three approvers; Robert Jackman, Carol Parry, and Henry Jones must act on this task. Once they have all approved, the promotion is approved.

Now that we’ve seen the two ways to configure your parallel approvals, let’s look at how to set up each.

In this first example, we’ll set up parallel approvals for employee travel expenses; where the first person to respond to the notification is the only response needed.

First ensure you are on the Approval Rules tab.

Go to Setup and Maintenance work area > Application Extensions functional area > All Tasks > Manage Approval Transactions for Human Capital Management task > Approval Rules tab

Start by entering the task that you want to configure and click Search. For this example, the Document Record task is needed.

Ensure that the Bypass Approvals option is off so that it can be routed for approval to participants. When it’s on, the circle turns blue.

Now click the Configure Rules icon.

On this page, you can specify approval rules. However, in this example, we’ll not add approval rules; we’ll focus on the set up of parallel approvals only.

So click Edit Approval Participants to go to the next page.

On the next page, click Open.

And then select the Document Record Approvers icon.

Now scroll down to view the fields where you’ll set up your parallel approvals. Select the Type as Parallel.

The First responder wins field is selected by default.

You can click Submit at the top if you want the first responder rule for a travel expense report to take effect.

In this second example, we’ll use the same scenario for approving expense reports, and set up the vote outcome based on your organization wanting all approvers to respond to the notification.

After you’ve selected the Type as Parallel, you can deselect the First responder wins field to view the vote outcome fields.

Since we want all approvers to respond and approve this transaction, enter 100 in the Vote Outcome Approve % field. This means all approvers have to approve the transaction for it to move forward.

For more information on parallel approvals, these are the additional resources you can access.

This concludes the explanation of how to configure parallel approvals.

Thanks for watching.