How to Create an Approval Task with Multiple Recipients

The Approval Task in Nutrient Workflow provides a method to quickly add and configure an approval step in your workflow. Configuring an Approval Task with a single approver is fairly straight-forward, but it can become more complicated if you have an approval process with multiple recipients, a required sequence, and thresholds associated with these approvals.

A common scenario that would create this type of situation is the Purchase Requisition Process where a Purchase Requisition is submitted for approval and based on the total amount of the Purchase Requisition certain individuals in the organization will need to approve it in a specific order (queue).

The most basic approach to handling this would be to have an Approval Task for each possible approver, but if you have several potential approvers/thresholds the workflow could become cumbersome and difficult to manage.

A more efficient approach would be to use a single approval task to handle this situation, but how is this done? Let’s create an example.

First, here are the approval requirements/thresholds to drive the example:

1. All Purchase Requisitions require Department Level Approval

2. If the Purchase Requisition is > $1000, then it requires both Department Level and VP Approval

3. If the Purchase Requisitions  > $100,000, then it requires Department Level,  VP, and CEO Approval

In the diagram below, we have the simple process we will use to support the scenario. It includes a Form Task to capture the total amount of the Purchase Requisition. An Approval Task which gives the approver the option to either Approve or Deny the Purchase Requisition. In addition, we have two milestones to update the status of the workflow.

Since we are dealing with multiple recipients of a task we need to consider the Process Rule for our recipients. We want our approval tasks to be delivered in sequence so we will select the ‘Each in Order’ Process Rule. Then, we need to define a sequence (or queue) for the approvers. In this example, we are indicating to Nutrient Workflow that when this task is fired, the Department Level Approver should receive the task before the other recipients. Once the Department Level Approver submits the task, then the VP should approve it. After the VP Approver submits the task, then the CEO should approve it (see below diagram).

Ok. So that handles the approval sequence, but what about the thresholds? In our scenario, we only want the VP to receive the Approval Task if the Purchase Requisition is over $1000.To handle this, we just need to configure the data rules for the VP recipient (see below diagram).

Similarly, we only want the CEO to receive the Approval Task if the Purchase Requisition is over $100,000. So, we setup the data rule for that recipient as well (see below diagram).

Since we are dealing with multiple recipients of an Approval task we will also want to consider the ‘Complete Task if Selected’ configuration setting. If this option is set to ‘Yes’ and the related item is selected in the executing workflow,  then the Approval Task will complete immediately and cancel the other recipients of this task.

In our scenario this would be useful in the case that any of the recipients deny the Purchase Requisition. The idea being that once any of the approvers selects the denied option then there is really no reason for the other recipients to spend time reviewing the Purchase Requisition (since it has already been denied). You can see how this option is configured in the diagram below.