Question

How do you re-run a process with a corrected form?

Forms

Updated May 1, 2020

asked on April 30, 2020

I currently have a form I'm building that goes through up to 4 different levels of approvals. The very first step in the process is an exclusive gateway that determines which signatures are required. I'd like to set it up to where if at any point in the process someone notices an issue with it, they can reject the form, at which point it will send it back to the initiator and prompt them to make the necessary changes, notify everyone who has approved it prior to them, and then send it back through the exact same process workflow a 2nd time for approval.

I thought this would be simple to set up but then I quickly realized the way I was doing it (via gateways) wasn't going to work due to having multiple inputs. In the below workflow, I'd like the revised form to enter the exclusive gateway and then proceed through the entire process (or a comparable process), but I wasn't able to make that work. Here's the workflow (with no rejection/re-run process built in):

I'm still fairly new to building forms so any advice would be greatly appreciated! Thanks so much!

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Replies

replied on May 1, 2020

Hi Dylan

Do the approvals happen sequentially or in Parallel?
if Sequentially then you would need an Exclusive Gateway between Approvers 1 & w, 2 &3, and 3 & 4, to test if another approves is required.
if the case is they would approve in parallel, then you would use an Inclusive gateway in the beginning that would have the condition row whether each approved was required.

When routing back to your initiator, you will need to have a task for them to make changes to the form and submit back into your gateway.

For the rejection process, if one Rejects then you would use a Signal event to kill the other approvers tasks and you could also send them an email on that same loop.

Not knowing how you are assigning users, Using Teams with Roles ( using filters) can help with the task assignment as I prefer to not have to update my workflow when people change, instead I just update the people in the team. There are some nice features in Teams, I suggest you read up on them as they have some unique features that are helpful with task assignments.

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replied on May 1, 2020

Good morning Steve, and thanks for the response! The approvals happen sequentially: Supervisor > Director > HR > and then an optional 4th CMO approval.

The issue I ran into is that when creating a task for the initiator to make changes and then "submit back into [my] gateway", I keep getting an error: "The gateway named "Determine Signatures Needed" in the "Main Process" is improperly connected to other objects. Gateways cannot have multiple incoming and outgoing sequence flows." I cannot have a second input going into that gateway, even if it comes from a user task with the same form as the starting form. Any suggestions?

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replied on May 1, 2020

Hi Dylan

I think you could design it like this to get the results you are looking for

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replied on May 1, 2020

That looks like it would work for the most part, with the exception of that very first gateway needing to have conditions that determine at which point in the process the approvals start. Based on data on the form, the supervisor or director approvals might be skipped, as you can see in the first screenshot I posted of the existing workflow. Adding that logic in means there's multiple inputs and multiple outputs to that gateway, which it doesn't seem to like.

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replied on May 1, 2020

Hi Dylan

In that case, then we need another Exclusive gateway to make the decision regarding where to start.

As you noted, an Exclusive gateway cannot have multiple input so you would add a gateway on the path (no rule required) earlier such as below to get around this issue.

Regarding the emails going out when a rejection happens, that gets a little trickier not knowing to build in more logic as to should those who were skipped in the process receive notification anyways.

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replied on May 1, 2020

I think that will work Steve! Thanks! As for the notifications, maybe I scrap that idea and just add a checkbox that I can check on the form that will toggle on/off an html field at the top of the form letting them know that the form is being resent because X reason, so they're not confused as to why they're receiving the same form again.

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replied on May 1, 2020

That could work for sure. I'm not a fan of more emails :)

If you wanted to have the Notification I think I would add a Sub-Process and build the email notification logic in there based on the same idea as your Where to Start Exclusive Gateway. Then all task would feed into it.

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replied on May 1, 2020

That would most definitely do the trick I think! I too am a fan of fewer emails, so maybe I'll go that route: Add a checkbox that can make a comment field appear with the changes that were made and request that they re-approve the form. I think that's a winning idea!

And I added that additional gateway into the workflow and it seemed to fix the issues I was having. That's such a simple workaround that for some reason I didn't think of. This is why I appreciate this community, haha. Thanks so much Steve!

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How do you re-run a process with a corrected form?

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