Automating the approval process for employee vacations
The goal of this use case is to enable an administrator and a case business analyst to configure approvals for cases in BMC Helix Business Workflows.
Scenario
Employees in Calbro Services request for vacations. These requests need to be approved by the managers of these employees. To make this approval process easy and quick, as an administrator, you can configure an approval for vacation requests. This approval requires a requester's manager to approve cases. Whenever the approval is run for a case, the case is sent to the requester's manager for approval. After the manager approves the case, the case status is changed based on an approval mapping, and the case is closed by the case agent.
Configuring approvals for vacation requests provides the following benefits:
- At the same time, managers can review the request details and approve or reject the request.
- Case agents can view the approval details, like list of approvers, pending approvals, and status of approvals on the case details page. This ensures that case agents do not spend time on following up on case approvals.
Workflow
The following figure illustrates the process for configuring approvals for BMC Helix Business Workflows:
The following table describes the steps for configuring the approval and approving an employee's case of request for vacation:
Task | Role | Action | Reference |
|---|---|---|---|
Configuring approvals | |||
1 | Case business analyst and administrator | Configure an approval by defining the approver and how the approval should be run. For example, an approval configured for PTO requests requires manager's approval. An approval configured for maternity leave requires manager's and HR manager's approval as well. | |
2 | Case business analyst | Define the status trigger for an approval. Define the status to which the case transitions, based on an approval outcome. Apply the approval to specific case templates. For example, create an approval mapping for the HR line of business with the status trigger as Assigned. When a case is created for the HR line of business and is moved to Assigned, the approval is triggered for that case. | |
Case approval | |||
3 | Case agent | In BMC Helix Business Workflows, a case is created to log a request. | |
4 | Case agent | In BMC Helix Business Workflows, as a case agent, update the status of the case. The approval is triggered for the case. You need not work manually on the approval as the approval is automatically executed. For example, a case for an employee's request for vacation is moved to Assigned and approval is triggered for the case. | |
5 | Approver | In the Approval console or BMC Helix Digital Workplace Advanced client application, after the approval is triggered, approve or reject the request. In this example, the employee's manager receives a notification in the BMC Helix Digital Workplace Advanced client application, and approves the employee's vacation request. | |
6 | Case agent | In BMC Helix Business Workflows, the case status is changed automatically based on the approval outcome. The case agent can then close the case. | |