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Signature and approval chains, without writing code.
The Documenos® workflow management system fully deserves the name "flexible", because its technique for modeling business steps has unique capabilities.
Thanks to an extensive concept library, flows in structures made up of thousands of units and tens of thousands of employees are managed with a single model.
Tasks can be defined individually or as groups, depending on the conditions you set.
You model every scenario you may need in business simply by entering data on the definition screens.
To understand how the system works, let us briefly walk through three different examples.
A simple five-step signature and approval chain made up entirely of "Single Task" steps:
Having a "Security Group" account in the fourth step does not make that step a group task. For a task to be a group task, more than one person must perform tasks at that step.
The document is placed in the inbox of every group member; when any of them completes the task, it is removed from everyone's inbox. The process does not depend on a single person: any available group member can carry it out.
Unlike the first example, the task in step 3 is a group task. When the unit manager in step 2 completes their task, the document is distributed to the people/groups in this step simultaneously. So what exactly is the purpose of a group task? Let's say this is an "Assignment Form": the user created a document to go on a business trip, their manager approved it, and in the third stage the document was sent to three places at once:
Arranges ticket and hotel bookings.
If the employee requested an advance, transfers the money to their account.
Takes action to archive the form in the employee's personnel file.
If these three people/groups had to act in sequence as in the first example, at the very least the Travel and Accounting teams would be delayed waiting for each other. Group tasks allow work to be carried out simultaneously.
Say you have assigned 5 different people/groups to a group task. Their tasks need not be the same: some sign, some initiate, some approve, some take the required action. Any of the roles can be a user account, a unit manager or a group account. The rule you set defines when the group task is considered complete.
The task waits for every step in the group to be completed before moving on to the next step. Take committee decisions, for example: you add the committee members to the group task and specify that everyone must sign.
Members could also sign one by one in sequence, but then the total time increases and a single member who delays signing keeps everyone waiting.
Completion of a certain number of tasks among the steps in the group can be deemed sufficient. For example, if 5 signatures are enough for decisions of a 10-member board of directors to take effect, you simply enter 5 tasks in the group rule.
If the remaining members also want to sign, that's no problem: the document is not removed from their inbox, and they can complete their tasks whenever they wish.
Let's say the document is a purchase approval form. Someone submitted a request; the first approver is the purchasing manager, followed by the deputy general manager. However, we want the deputy general manager to be included in the approval chain only for purchases above a certain amount:
All you need to do is define a rule (let's call it X) in the third step of the chain and attach it as a condition to the deputy general manager. If the purchase request meets the condition, the system includes this step in the signature and approval chain. For more information on defining conditions, see the relevant topic.
