Old Reqs

Being in a prior year shouldn't be a concern unless there are commitments. If the requester is still expecting the order and you process it, the RQ commitment will change to a PO commitment and hit the current year. What I do with old (1 month or older) unreleased reqs is check to see if the requester ordered the same items on a subsequent req. Many times our requesters can't release a req because they're missing some data (cost, account, etc.) and instead of fixing the error they just start over and neglect to delete the old req. If I'm feeling generous I'll send an email to the requester detailing the req information and ask them if they still want the supplies. Most times I just delete them. I do have a couple requesters that enter reqs but don't release them until their manager says it’s ok do to budgeting concerns. Those I'll just let be.

I meant it shouldn't be a concern even if there are commitments...

Same as John - I run RQ140 quarterly and delete unreleased reqs older than 3 months. Our process flow auto-rejects items pending approval for 14 days.

I also have a Crystal report that shows me all reqs that are in Needs Approval status, the date the work unit was started, what level it's waiting on and who the approver is. The only thing I haven't figured out is how to get the report to show me when a req is escalated and to which approver.

WFMETSUM has them for closed workunits- it's the start date and time and the activity_id goes higher per level. So if you run a query for max(activity_id) and get start_date, start_time - that's when it escalated to the last approver.

During approval, we have it making a Req Header Display Only comment with the date/time stamp. I know it shows on Workunit Metrics Task as status "1" (Action awaiting) with the date - but I don't know the associated table.

Thank you all for the advice. It was all helpful.