Requisition Approvals - Vacation handling and approver maintenance

You can create a Design Studio form to allow users to designate a proxy approver - I have set this up a couple of different times.

Task filter maintenance can be done a couple of different ways - for HR Supervisor (if you're not using the HR User Action) you can run a nightly flow to sync the Supervisor structure to your PF approvers.
You can also create a Design Studio form to to allow specific users to make changes (this would trigger a flow to perform the actual PF Admin updates so you don't have to give these users the PFIAdmin task)>

Thanks for the ideas David. We are unfortunately not using Design Studio, so I may have to get creative with technologies that we have outside of Lawson.

That is a good idea on the sync with the HR structure. I don't think it will work in our case, but we have several systems where we've defined the leadership structure for accounting unit that may be able to be leveraged.

One of the ideas that was put forward was to have a permanent backup assigned for each filter location. Have you seen this done to either good or bad results?

We have "Level 1 Backup" as a separate task in PFI and the process flow has a separate email with "Backup Notification" in the subject to allow users to distinguish and create Outlook rules to manage them.

If they want to be a permanent backup approver, we make them complete a security request. If it's just to cover a vacation and the backup is already an approver, that's usually just an email.

All the buyers are unfiltered Level 1 Backup. In a worse case scenario (approver out sick with no backup) the buyers can approve the reqs. We average about 2% a month where the buyers approve in the manager's absence.

Thanks for the reply Kat. How did you set it up so that the Level 1 Backup can approve, but receives a different email than the regular Level 1? When I was looking into this, I saw I could add multiple tasks to the User Action Node, but I thought everyone gets the same email message.

It was part of the Process Flow as designed by Lawson. I had to tell them we wanted different emails. (i'm spoiled and have others actually build the flows, so I'm not much help on that.)

In Rich Client -
Approver A is task Level 1, task category "Req Loc" with Value "LocA" email subject "Req 1234 from KAT VILA for $ 1,234.56 requires your approval."
Approver B is task Level 1 BackUp, task category "Req Loc" with Value "LocA" email subject "Backup Notfication: Req 1234 from KAT VILA for $ 1,234.56 requires your approval."
Buyer is task Level 1 BackUp with Filter Enabled: No (Unchecked) email subject "Backup Notfication: Req 1234 from KAT VILA for $ 1,234.56 requires your approval." Which means they get an email for EVERY req as it's released. We all have a rule to delete them. They only act if a user calls for an order that can't wait for the approver to get back.

The emails are otherwise identical. In the Inbasket, Level 1 appears above Level 1 BackUp so they have to pick which one they look at. Other than that, the process is the same.

Darn, I was really curious how you got the separate emails. From what I can see in the user action node, I can assign multiple tasks like that, but they all get the same email.

Thanks for the additional information on this.

Bob - use the UA email for the Level1 approver, then a separate email node (sent just prior to the UA) for the Level1 backup...same verbiage with different Subject line, different recipients.
You could even skip the UA email and have 2 email nodes that preceed the UA...same results.

Ah, that's a good idea to do the emails on the outside. Would you then not do reminder emails? Or just to the Level 1 task and not "all users who haven't taken action"?

You could send reminder emails to either or both...your call.

I'm not a big fan of the reminder email within the User Actions, since it's a "one time" email. I prefer scheduling a flow that sends reminders daily, typically between midnight and 5AM. This is the approach i always suggest to clients. This way approvers are reminded daily, and work units tend to move progress a little quicker (since most don't like getting reminded more than once).
Plus - it provides somewhat of an audit trail for when approvers say "i was never notified"...i can go into the daily "reminder" work unit and tell them exactely when they were notified.

How quickly do you escalate? Our business users are set on a 3 hour escalation right now (they feel the orders are too urgent to let sit) so a nightly notification doesn't work.

What i was referring to was strictly inbasket email notifications (i.e. "you have outstanding tasks..."), not actual user action escalations. Current client doesn't use the escalation functionality, but i've been at others where 48 business hours was the norm, but those were HR actions.

if you wanted NOTIFICATIONS sent more often, then you could schedule a inbasket reminder flow to run multiple times/day...say every three hours. You could easily design it to send different types of reminders at different intervals. Ex: Reminder flows runs every 3 hours. if HR type action is found, only send reminder 1/day; if Supply Chain, send reminder every run; if Type x, send reminder every other run

Tim,

Would you mind sharing a birds-eye view of the concept or design approach to your "inbasket email notifications" flow?

The concept is very intriguing to me, as we have struggled with the fact that the reminder & escalation emails can be somewhat limited depending upon how they're used. As a result, we too are sometimes stuck combating the "I wasn't notified" defense on those occasions when requisitions sit unapproved beyond the escalation period.

Unfortunately, both our usage and knowledge of IPA is limited so I wasn't aware that a flow could be built to monitor the inbaskets in this way. Just hearing how someone else has handled this situation may help us to be able to take a similar approach and develop our own similar flow.

Thanks!