Approval Workflow user group - flaw when resending approval request

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Posted on by ew9800

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In Business Central I set up a workflow for sales order approvals with a workflow user group where the document gets released after the 1st approval. This works well. The flaw is that if the order needs to be re-opened as is often the case to make a change to the order, the user now cannot resend for approval because 'send approval request' button is unlit. I realize this is because there are still open approval entries for the other workflow user group members on the original request. So the options now are for the original approval request to be delegated to the administrator and subsequently approved or all members of the group must approve the original request. This defeats the purpose of using the workflow user group this way which was to make the process more efficient.

Is there a better way to accomplish this either with or without a workflow user group?

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Renato Fajdiga 1,853 on at

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Hi,

why you release the SO after 1st approval if you are still waiting for others to approve?

Maybe the good approach can be:

1. Requestor sends the SO for approval to multiple approvers

2. If 1st approver, approve the SO, and you notice that some change needs to be made

3. Requestor should first cancel approval request -> SO will become Open

4. Requestor make the change

5. Requestor repeat step 1 and SO get back to 1st approver for approval.

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ew9800 182 on at

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Hi,

I'm releasing after 1st approval because only 1 approval is required. The reason I set up the workflow user group was to have a pool of people eligible to approve so that no bottleneck is created with it being dependent on only 1 person in case they are too busy or away. Similarly, I didn't want to use a delegate/substitute because that would also slow down the process.

So is it possible to accomplish out of the box?

Thanks.

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Community Member on at

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Hello,

Adding to Renato's reply... I am not sure how you create the Workflow User Group for 'Only One Approval Required' but to help I am attaching my training handout.

Hope this helps.

Thanks,

Steve

6170.Workflow-User-Groups-can-be-a-valuable-tool-that-offers-quite-a-bit-of-flexibility-and-functionality-in-the-approval-process-for-Workflows-in-NAV.docx

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ew9800 182 on at

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Thank you for the handout. However, it does not address the scenario indicated in my post. The issue with the "only one approver required" setup is that it does not handle orders needing re-approval after reopening the order to make a change.

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Marco Mels on at

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Hello,

Feel free to address this issue to Microsoft so we can assist directly. I am very interested to see how this works in a standard CRONUS company and why delegating the responsibility to another approver slows down the system or business process.

Thanks.

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ew9800 182 on at

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Just a note to say this was resolved by adding the 'Approve the approval request for the record' to the responses for the 'An approval request is approved' event of the workflow. By adding this, as soon as any of the sequence 1 approvers approves the SO, all other approval entries get changed to 'approved i.e. no 'open' entries are left and upon re-opening order, the user is now able to re-send document for approval'.

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ew9800 182 on at

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Hi Marco,

This has been resolved, I just added the solution to this post but to answer your question, delegating the responsibility would have added a step to the process therefore slowing down the business process because people are not always available to check their approval requests, monitor for open (delayed) entries and the scenario here would require customer service to get in touch with approver or administrator as their hands were tied not being able to request approval.

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Marco Mels on at

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Great work and thank you for sharing!

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Quentin Turban 6 on at

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Thank you because I had the same requirement and was becoming crazy behind my computer to find a solution to manage this.

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Arun_Shaw 5 on at

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Awesome Solutions..

But the gap is that after this approval process, we do not know who has actually approved, because all the lines get approved.

Is there any way to change the status of approval to "Canceled" and Released the document.?

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