Auto-Approve user actions?

Is anyone doing anything with IPA regarding auto-approval actions? I'm looking at different ways to do it, but every solution I thought of doesn't fulfill auditing purposes. Basically, I would like to say that if the submitted is also the approver, then auto-approve the action. It's easy enough to skip the UA, but I don't know how that would be auditable.

Just looking for some advice/guidance on this.

Thanks!

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Process Automation (IPA) - General Discussions

Comments

unknown

We frequently skip the approval step if the submitter is also an approver or in an approver task - mostly for convenience. By policy, we assume that the submitter is considered an approver, and we always require two levels of approval. We also code our flows so that someone can not approve a change to their own record.

However, we are not a public company, so we don't have quite the same auditing controls.

Just a thought - I imagine you could create a landmark node that would add a record to the approvers table (I can't think what that table is called at the moment).

john-miller

PFIMETRICS holds the Action Taken by approvers.

jreese

I am working on it from a different angle, previous approver also has the next approval role, and what I have been told is that the PfiActivity, PfiQueue, PfiQueueAssignment, PfiMetrics and PfiMetricsSummary tables all need to be updated to duplicate what is updated when an Approver performs an action. Still working on developing so can't verify for sure.

russel-cornelson

Good afternoon Andrew,

You should be able to look up a list of people who should be the "approver" to a flow; then instead of directly routing the flow to the user action, you could send this flow to a Asyncronous Trigger, then to the User Action.

By the time the new flow triggers and starts running, the "Approval Flow" would be sitting at the user action. The child/triggered flow would then be able to use the Parent's workunit number to look and check if the requester = approver. If they are identical, a Landmark transaction:

module=pfi

object=PfiWorkunit

ActionName=TakeAction

PfiWorkunit=PARENTWorkunit#

Action="Approve/etc"

Then end the child flow.

NOTE: You can only approve user actions assigned to a user this way, I don't think this works if it's sent to a task. So all your work would be in getting your approver list and sending the UserAction to a single user. Since the user action isn't skipped, all your data would be there for audit purposes. Since the actual "approve" action would be taken this would also be recorded.

You could even send the workunit to a subprocessing state first, aka workunit is assigned to "lawson" account at user action, child flow takes "Auto Approve Requester equals Approver" or "Manual Approval Required" action then send to a regular user action node for approval or skip on by.

This would get you your pfiqueuetask/pfimetrics in both scenarios without having to modify how it gets to the users. Aka normal functionality of creating users/tasks ... but flow is always routed to lawson account first for that first approval.

russel-cornelson

P.S.

KB Article 1667935 on Infor Xtreme - Contains sample scripts and flows.

IPABP-JobSubmit.lpd and IPABP-JobWait.lpd use this "Auto Approval" of a user action. In this case one flow wants to submit a job, it passes the information on to the other flow via Trigger node then goes to a Wait node. The other flow submits the job, periodically checks until that job is complete, then takes an action on the "parent's" User Action node to resume processing of that main flow. Totally different purpose, but if you need an example of 1 flow taking action on a user action node that is in there.

unknown

I am not a technical person but we do have a process for pre-approved standard journal entries. We use the journal entry source code as the trigger. We set up user-defined source codes S1 through S9 and if a journal entry, whether it is GL or RJ system code, is released with an "Sx" source code, it bypasses IPA and flips the approval flag on GL01.4.

unknown

Yes you can auto-approve

unknown

If the processes for that service is set to Immediate Approve - wouldn't the audit log show who completed the action? Meaning the last person to submit the action is the one who submitted and approved it; and the audit log would also show this?

john-miller

We have a flow that Auto approves everything to the Final Approver for everything submitted 2 business Days before the end of the month. We use the technique Russ Describes below. Our Auto approver uses the Lawson user, but the Submitting user is the Originator on the Workunit, so they wouldn't be hard to find. When you find a match for "Auto Approve" you can go down a separate path where the only Action Available on the User Action is "Auto Approve" (Or some other action that sets it apart from a normal User Action Approval) and use Russ's method of triggering the Action. This will create an Audit log just like if the user clicked on "Approve" themselves.

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