Approval Process in Force.com

In some of the recent articles we studied about Workflow and how to set them up in Force.com platform. The other part of workflow is Approval Process. Workflow is triggered when a record is added or updated. Approval process is triggered when the user manually clicks on 'Submit for Approval' button.

An approval process consists of steps and actions. An approval process is a sequence of steps that finally declare the record as approved. You can also define who must approve at each step. Thus, by defining approval process, records that need different approvals are submitted to the right people at the right time. And just like workflows, we can setup actions as part of the approval process as well. 

An approval process consists of the following -

1. Process Definition - Process definition contains Name and Description. Entry Criteria can be specified here for setting a filter to find the records for which you are applying the approval process. You can specify the user for automated approval routing for approval steps and also specify if the approver along with the administrator can edit records that are pending approval. Email template can be specified to use for notifying approvers. The approval page can be designed to display appropriate details for approver to see while approving. You can specify initially who can submit the records for approval.

2. Initial Submission Actions - You can specify actions to execute when a record is initially submitted for approval. Actions could be Task, Email Alert, Field Update or Outbound Message.

3. Approval Steps - You can define one or more approval steps in the approval process. Approval steps are numbered that determines the order. Entry criteria can be specified for each step allowing records to enter that step only if it meets the criteria. You can specify who should approve the records that are in this step. For each step you can specify approval and rejection actions.

4. Final Approval Actions - You can specify actions to execute at the end of the approval process, that is after the record has passed all the necessary steps and approved.

5. Final Rejection Actions - Just like final approval actions, you may specify rejection actions to indicate what must happen if rejected.

6. Recall Actions - An approval request can be recalled. Hence you could specify actions to execute if recalled.


As you can see, the Force.com platform lets us cover all the possibilities. As you can also imagine, how quickly an approval process can get too complicated, a through planning and designing is a must before we venture into setting up approval process.

Happy cloud computing using Salesforce!

Workflow and Approval Process in Force.com

In any organization there are number of scenarios where processes are so standard and could be easily automated to reduce the delay or gap between the steps. The Workflow and Approval Process components in Force.com platform covers these requirements. 

Creating the  business logic based on the requirements and implementing the workflow process in the platform is an easy task just like other features we have been exploring in the previous articles. We create rules to customize processes. Using these rules we can automate the processes. 

The workflow component in the Force.com Platform allows us to perform the following -

Assigning Tasks. Tasks can be assigned to a user, a role or the record owner. For example, automatically assign a task to a representative for conducting customer satisfaction survey after a week of selling your product or service.

Field Updates. Value of a field in a record can be updated to new value. For example, when Status of an order is changed to 'Closed', the closed date can be automatically set.

Send Email Alerts. Emails can be sent out to one or more recipients. For example, when the status of an order is set to 'Shipped', email can be automatically sent out to the buyer.

Send API Messages. XML format API messages can be sent out to designated listener. For example, send out an outbound API message to an external HR System for initiating the expense reimbursement process.

Workflow automates processes. Approvals take care of the automatic approval of a record. An approval process can specify when to approve and who should approve a record. You can also specify the actions to take when the approval process is executed. 

Let us see some classic examples for approval process usage. 

*    An employee leave approval policy where different people or roles or departments have to approve depending on various criteria. 

*    Expense report approval policy where if within a certain amount may be it is automatically approved, and beyond  certain amount it may need approval by different people.

*    Employee recruiting process where depending on which department employee is being hired, process needs approval from different people starting from opening up that post in the organization to employee coming on board.

As you can see Workflow and Approval process could be so much useful to any organization. In the upcoming articles let us explore how to configure these components in the platform.

Happy cloud computing using Salesforce!