Question

How to use a wait condition for a multiple department approval process?

Workflow

Updated November 11, 2014

asked on November 10, 2014

Hi All,

I need to put a wait condition for my workflow where an invoice is routed to 10-12 different departments selected from the department field for an approval. I have a multi value field for Approval or Decline called "Approved By" and "Declined By" with the list of all departments.

I have tried comparing field values with the token values but no success.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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Answer

SELECTED ANSWER

replied on November 10, 2014

Break out the approval step into parts. Say, use a Parallel Conditional Sequence to test if each possible department is within that field/token, and for each of those, to invoke the wait condition particular to the field you need.

This way, for all the included departments, it will go into that sequence and will not advance until all the approvals have been made.

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Replies

replied on November 11, 2014

Instead of (or perhaps in conjunction with) your "Approved By" and "Declined By" fields, you could look into the possibility of using individual department approval fields. So you would have new fields for "Sales Approval" and "Accounting Approval". This will allow you to use a wait condition to say "[Dept Name] Approval equals Approved" and you can break out each department into their own specific fields. Additionally, you can use Field Access Rights to prevent users from Department A from seeing and having the ability to change Department B's Approval field.

If you would like to maintain the "Approved/Declined By" fields, you can automate this with Workflow! Whenever the wait condition(s) for the individual departments are satisfied, retrieve whether the field was approved or denied and add the department name in the "Approved/Declined By" field.

Let me know if you use this method and have any questions on how to set up a workflow like this!

Good luck!

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replied on November 11, 2014

Thanks Kenneth and Rob for your suggestions.

Kenneth, I implemented your suggestions in my workflow and worked successfully.

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How to use a wait condition for a multiple department approval process?

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