Approvals

In BMC Helix Business Workflows, certain cases might need approvals from the concerned manager, business group, and so on, before the case agents can proceed with the cases. Approvals can be required for a case at different stages of the case lifecycle. An approval is an end-to-end process that starts when a case is sent for approval until an approval outcome occurs for the case. 

Administrators can configure self-approvals, approval flows, or a chain of approvals.

An approval configuration ensures that:

• administrators can define the business logic for approvals quickly.
• approving authorities can review the pending requests for approval, and approve or reject them, as required.

For example, an employee requests for a monetary award for a colleague and the following events take place:

• A case agent creates a case for the employee.
• The case goes through the approval process.
• Because it is a monetary award, first the manager of the employee approves the case.
• Because the monetary award is large, next the manager of the manager approves the case.

Flow of approval

The following figure illustrates how an approval is processed end-to-end:

After an administrator configures an approval and a case status triggers an approval, the approval is executed in the following way:

1. The system checks if the case matches with a self approval expression. If the case matches with a self approval expression, the self approval is run for the case. Based on the approval outcome, the case status is changed.
2. If the case does not match with a self approval expression, the system checks for an expression in approval flows. If the case matches with an approval flow expression, the approval is run for the case based on the approval flow configuration. Based on the approval outcome, the case status is changed.
3. If the case does not match with any expression defined in self approvals or approval flows, it means that no approval is found for the case.
   The case exits the approval process and the case status is changed based on an approval mapping.
   For more information about approval mapping, see Creating-approval-mappings.

Approvers

An approver can be an employee, a company (business unit or support group), a vendor, and so on. An administrator can specify an approver, multiple approvers, or percentage of approvers to approve a case. For more information about specifying approvers, see Configuring approval flows.

An approver can review the cases that are pending for approval in any of the following ways:

• Approval Console—Use the Approval console to approve or reject cases. In the Approval console, the approver can view the case fields for additional information about a case.
  For more information about different approval statuses and updating an approval request by using the Approval console, see Viewing and responding to approval requests.

• BMC Helix Digital Workplace Advanced client application—Use the BMC Helix Digital Workplace Advanced client application to approve or reject cases.
  For more information about different approval statuses and updating an approval request by using the BMC Helix Digital Workplace Advanced client application, see Approving business requests.

How approvals are triggered and cases are evaluated

A status trigger defined in an approval mapping triggers an approval. The system evaluates a case that matches with an approval expression. Then, the approval is executed for the case.

The following sections explain a status trigger and an expression in detail, and their flow:

•  Status trigger—In an approval mapping, a case business analyst defines a case status that triggers an approval for a case. The case business analyst also defines the status to which the case transitions, based on an approval outcome—case is approved, rejected, canceled, errored out, or no approval is found for the case.When an approval is triggered, the following events take place:

  • Status of the case changes to Pending.
  • Value of the Status Reason field is Approval.
  • Case assignee is notified about the status change.

  When a case is approved, the case transitions to the next status specified in the approval mapping. When a case is rejected, the case transitions to the previous status specified in the approval mapping. For information about approval mappings, see Creating-approval-mappings.

• Expression—An expression evaluates for which case an approval should be run. The case evaluation is initiated only after an approval is triggered.
  For example, a case agent creates case A and case B. Approval is triggered, case A matches with expression A, and case B matches with expression B. Then, approvals for which the expressions are defined are executed for the respective cases.

Approval notifications

An administrator can also create notifications that are related to approvals. The administrator can create notifications to notify individuals such as an approver, an agent, a requester, and so on about certain events. For example, an administrator creates a notification Case pending for approval that notifies an approver about a case that requires approval.

For more information about how to configure approval notifications, see Creating-approval-notifications.

Related topicsApprovals

Configuring-approvals

Automating-the-approval-process-for-employee-vacations

Example-of-configuring-approvals