Planning an approval process
In some organizations, the user community does not know the status of data in the system and is unable to give status along the steps of the business process. This impacts the company by leaving it with a lack of direction and communication.
System administrators can use the application component Longview Workflow Designer to configure the approval processes that are used by their user community. All other users can use Longview Workflow on the web to report on the status of Data Areas in the application database, in accordance with your company’s own business process steps.
In this chapter, you can find information on these main topics:
Understanding the Longview Workflow Designer component
Longview Workflow allows users to set and report on the status of a Data Area in the application database and provides a mechanism to notify users of status.
Longview Workflow consists of two parts:
- System administrators use the Longview Workflow Designer, a component, to create an approval process.
- All other users can use a Longview Workflow web page to request approval of data, and to approve or reject data submitted by other users.
Once an approval process is activated by the System administrator, users who are Owners or Approvers of specific Data Areas go to an application web page in order to set the status of their areas. Some users can view the Data Areas on the web, based on their symbol access rights, but cannot change any status.
Planning a process
Before you begin you need to plan your approval process. Because you must make some decisions in the software, and because symbols in various approval processes cannot overlap, it is a good idea to plan the process first.
You need to find the answers to many questions to determine your goal from a high-level perspective, and to specify the details and the people involved to meet that goal. Use the following questions as a starting point:
- What is the scope of the approval process? (Planning process? Month-end consolidation process?)
- What symbols in your application database need to be included? How many levels down?
- Who are the people who input data?
- Who are the people who approve data at various levels?
- What is the chain of command? Does it exactly mimic one of your application dimensions (often ENTITIES)?
- Do you want to enforce the chain of command, or will you allow overrides if necessary?
- Do you want Approvers to be able to view reports on the submitted data before they make any decisions? If so, do you have an existing report template to associate with Data Areas in this process?
Strategies
You do not always have to fit an entire business process (for example an Annual Business Plan), within one approval process. One business process can be broken down into multiple approval processes for logistical or practical reasons. Although not technically linked, the multiple approval processes would be treated as one multi-phase business process. As System administrator, you would be responsible for activating and deactivating each process at the appropriate times.
If one of your business processes is very long and complex, you can break it down into one main high-level and many smaller lower-level approval processes. Each low-level process would be activated or deactivated at appropriate times, while each of the main process steps could be made to represent the completion of each low-level process, so that the progress of the process as a whole could be made easier to view and interpret by the management or by the user population as a whole.
Your Corporate Finance group may prepopulate some data before a process can even begin or may populate some other data after the end-user input phase is complete (for example, corporate overhead allocations or shared services allocations). In some cases, it may not be necessary or practical to include such early and late steps within the approval process itself.