Approving or rejecting cases

In a line of business, a requester requests for various services and, as a case agent, you can create cases for these requests and work on them.

There might be certain cases that authorized individuals need to approve before you can proceed with the cases. For example, a requester requests a performance award for a colleague that requires the HR manager to approve the case.

When an approval is triggered, the status of the case changes to Pending with the status reason as Approval, and a notification is sent to the case assignee about the status change. If a case business analyst modifies the default lifecycle of cases, then the modified lifecycle is displayed while creating or editing cases. For more information, see Modifying-the-lifecycle-of-cases-tasks-and-knowledge-articles.

Important

When an approval is triggered and the case matches with the expression defined in the self approval without process, the case details do not show the status bar with the approval details. The case status is changed to the status defined in the approval mapping for the approval outcome—Approved.

To view the list of approvers that are assigned to a case

In the status bar, click Show Approvers.

The Approver List pane displays the following details:

Open—Displays the list of approvers with whom the request is pending.
Closed—Displays the list of approvers who have approved the request.

To approve or reject a case from the Approval Console or BMC Helix Digital Workplace Advanced

Individuals can approve or reject a case from the Approval console, from the BMC Helix Digital Workplace Advanced client application, or through emails. If an alternate approver is assigned in BMC Helix Digital Workplace Advanced, the alternate approver can also view and approve the cases in BMC Helix Digital Workplace Advanced. The alternate approver can view the comments that are added to the case in BMC Helix Business Workflows. The alternate approver can also view the answers for the dynamic data questions that are added from the BMC Helix Digital Workplace Catalog questionnaire.

When approvers approve or reject a case from BMC Helix Digital Workplace Advanced, they need to enter comments if it is configured in the Action Request System (AR System) to require justification while approving or rejecting a case.

For information about updating an approval request through Approval console, emails, and BMC Helix Digital Workplace Advanced client application, see Viewing and responding to approval requests and Approving users' business requests.

Note

To view an approval request from the BMC Helix Digital Workplace Advanced client application, an approver must be assigned the FoundationRead functional role. For information about how to add a functional role to an approver, see Setting-up-roles-and-permissions.

To approve or reject a case from BMC Helix Business Workflows

When a case agent needs to approve or reject a case, it is sent for approval to a specified approval group. To approve or reject a case, a user from the specified approval group must open that case from the Case console. The approver can add an optional comment when approving or rejecting a case.

To approve or reject a case, complete the following steps:

Log in to BMC Helix Business Workflows.
Select Workspace > Case.
From the Line of Business list, select the line of business for which you want to approve or reject a case.
If you have access to a single line of business, the line of business is selected by default.
Open a case with the Pending status that needs approval.
The approval waiting time is displayed on the Pending Approval tab in a readable format, such as 44 seconds ago. You can hover over the time to view the detailed timestamp, such as Sep 13, 2021 3:13 PM.
Click Approve or Reject.
The following image shows the Approve and Reject options:

The status of the case changes to the status that is defined in the approval mapping. The date and time when the case is approved or rejected is displayed on the Approval Decision tab in the Sep 13, 2021 3:13 PM format. You can hover over the time to view a readable timestamp, such as 44 seconds ago.
In the Approval note or Rejection note pop-up window, if you want to add the reason for approving or rejecting the case, add a comment and click Add Note.
The comment is displayed on the Approver List tab and in the case activity feed. The comments that you add while approving or rejecting cases are displayed in BMC Helix Digital Workplace Advanced. If an alternate approver is assigned in BMC Helix Digital Workplace Advanced, the alternate approver can also view the comments.

Approval action messages in the case activity feed

After an approver approves or rejects a case, the case activity feed displays a message for the approval status with the following details:

Case approval status
List of the approvers who worked on the approval
Time when case approval was processed
Reason for approval or rejection, if added by the approver.

The case approval message is displayed in the case activity feed when the case approval has any of the following actions:

Approved
Rejected
Canceled
Error
Self approved
Auto approved

The following figure highlights the case approval message in the Activity tab:

1908_case approved.png

To view approval action messages

In the Activity tab, click Show Approvers to view the list of approvers who approved or rejected the case. You can see the Pending Approval and Approval Decision tabs when you click Show Approvers. The Show Approvers option is not available if the case approval is canceled.

Approval 2.png

For example, consider a scenario where you have a level up type of approval flow and three individuals need to approve or reject a case at three different stages.

The status of an approval is available in the activity feed after the approval process is completed.

If all three approvers approve the case, you can view the message in the case activity feed after all the approvals are complete.
If the second approver in the approval hierarchy rejects the case, you can view the message in the case activity feed after the approver rejects the case.