Approval Hierarchy

Approval profiles can reference one or many To Do Roles. The way in which you structure your approval profiles depends on how regulated the structure needs to be for your organization.

Your business practices may be such that your approvals can go to a limited number of supervisor and manager roles, or they can be more advanced having detailed levels. To this end, the To Do Roles you create can be shared across document types or they can be kept discrete to business process and functionality. This is also true for the No Approval user group. There can be one role to be reused across your approval processing configuration, or you can set more roles to address different functions.

One type of record, such as work order, might require several different Approval Profiles to address different situations. For example,
  • PM work might be “auto-approved” since the work needed has already been analyzed, planned and approved.
  • Emergency work might bypass normal approval processing since it might come in at off hours or will otherwise be subject to different approvals than regular work.
  • Regular work will likely require general approval processing.

Approval Types

Approval Types indicate whether the approval role is standard, mandatory, or notification only:
  • Standard: A standard approver might appear on the approval hierarchy with other approvers with equal approval authority. Any standard approver can record the decision before the record moves on to the next approver in the hierarchy.
  • Mandatory: Indicates that this approver must provide an approval decision on the record. Approval processing is not complete until this decision is recorded.
  • Notification Only: Notification only approvers are only sent an email that the approval is pending. The system does not validate an amount limit and the approver does not have to respond in order for the record to be approved.
Note: If an approver with enough authority approves the request, and there are no other mandatory approvers, the approval request is complete. In this case, other standard and notification only approvers on the approval path are skipped. No action can be taken to approve or reject the approval request.

Additional Approval Profile Settings

  • Initial Notification Method: Indicates whether the approver receives an e-mail, an alert in their To Do List, both, or none.
  • Authorized to Approve: (Non-Amount Based only) When multiple To Do Roles are added to the profile, this field identifies which is authorized to approve. At least one to do role must be added with this value set to Yes.
  • Amount Limit: Provides the maximum amount that the approver in the indicated role is allowed to approve. If the value on the record in need of approval exceeds this limit for the role, the approval path must move on to the next approver or the requester is notified that no one on the approval profile has sufficient authority to approve the request.
  • Timeout Threshold: Indicates the amount of time that the approver has to respond to the approval request, in days. For example, if the threshold is set to “2”, the approver has 2 days to approve requests.

    If the approver does not respond within the set time, another alert is sent. Additional alerts are sent up to the set number of retries.

  • Maximum Retry: Indicates the number of times that the system will retry sending the approval request to approvers with the To Do Role before timing out the request. For example, if the Timeout Threshold is set to “2” and the Maximum Retry is set to “3” the system will try three times for a total of 6 days resending the alert or email every 2 days. If the approvers fail to respond, the request is routed to the next approver in the hierarchy and that person receives the email or alert.