Workflow Email Notification - Adding Approvers

[troy.whitsel]

Has anyone run into the issue of not wanting email notifications to go out to approvers until ready to transition out of the workflow. 

We trained our users to not add approvers until ready to transition out of the state so that the email notification isn't sent to the approvers until its actually time to approve and move out of the state. The out of the box notification is triggered upon transition so you have to set approvers for the next state already.   Basically the way out of the box notifications work is that you need to predefine all your approvers up front, at which time those who have permission to approve are notified.  We are trying to solve the issue of a LONG lag between adding the approvers and actually moving between states, since the whole cycle could take months/years.   

For example in an NPI process if passing a phase gate into manufacturing we don't want to preadd approvers and notify them they have permission to approve all the way back when the project is defined and created.

[dany.poudrier]

Hi Troy,

Do you have different approvers list for each of your states or a list of approvers for all your states?

The default Change Order Workspace has one list for all States.

However if you look at the Projects workspace (from App Store "Engineering Product Management"), it has a list of approvers for each states.  That seems to be what you are looking for:

[troy.whitsel]

Thanks Danny -

Our project workspace is set up similar to the screen shot you have provided, and the approvers are the same for each state.  The challenge is a bit deeper.   We are using the approvals in PLM as our final sign off process in our organization.    So in your example below a project is created and sits in concept for 3-4 months while design team and Product managers define the actual project.  Then the team comes together and and agrees to move the project forward at which time we want an email to fire out to the management team to go approve the concept phase of project ABC (Our first attempt was to have the approvers added when we wanted the email to fire - Though we recently learned this never actually fires an email).  With the out of the box functionality if we preadd the approvers in the concept step the email notification is triggered and fired when the transition becomes available.  
 

I am  trying to create a solution to ensure the email notification is in sync with the time the approvers should actually be approving   The reason is if we add approvers up front the notification goes out and sits in the approver's inbox for an extended period of time before they would actually need to approve. 

One option on the table to to add a loopback transition so when approvers are added it loops back to the current state and notifies the approvers.   The optimal solution for us though is to stay as close to out of the box and work to change our internal process.  

[dany.poudrier]

Hi,

So if I understand you correctly, I see two options:

1- It seems that you have in your workflow map a missing Step: After the appropriate people have done the Concept Phase, you want to notify the approvers.  It seems to me that the step "Concept Done, Asking Approvers" should be the next step in your workflow. And on transition to that Step is where the real approvers would be notified. Moreover in that transition you can also have a script that checks if the approver's list is populated correctly. 

2- Since you seem to want to send an email outside of the normal "events", I suggest you do it via OnDemand Scripts.  You can get the list of approvers from the script and there is an API to send email. 

I think the option 1 is the best, seems more in tune with your process and requires very little customization.

[troy.whitsel]

Dany - We actually moved forward with the idea of introducing a hidden loopback transition back to the current state.   So when approvers our added the transition fires an email to the approvers.   We were able to rename each transition with the same nomenclature at the state itself so the end user is not confused or affected by the new transition.