Hello and welcome to another demonstration video offered by RPI Consultants. My name is Alex Lindsey, I’m a senior solution architect and today I’ll be demonstrating OnBase Approval Manager.
So a few things to note before I kind of jump into how it’s set up and what you can do and what some of the benefits are. It is a separately licensed product, it is meant to integrate directly into your OnBase workflow solutions. It is solution agnostic, meaning it doesn’t have to be for one specific solution, you can use Approval Manager for your approval needs across HR solutions, accounts payable, requisitions, contracts, anything you can really think of. So for however big your footprint is for OnBase, Approval Manager is a great tool to allow you to do that.
Some of the key benefits that I’ll call out early on so they make a little bit more sense in the video is that for one, you may have approval process built out already within your OnBase solution workflow, but with this, this condenses what you may have is multiple, multiple queues, with lots of logic and things like that built out already. This condenses it, with Approval Manager condenses it down to one single queue that manages all of your approvals.
The other big benefit is that with Approval Manager sees and things like that, particularly in AP invoice approvals, which we’re going to demonstrate here today is that the management and the update of that hierarchy and that matrix can be very cumbersome, and very taxing sometimes on an OnBase administrator, who may have to handle that for the entire company, which may be very large. So what Approval Manager does is it actually gives business owners access to the matrix to modify it from unity client.
So if we’re jumping in real quick, the first place we’d start if we were setting this up and once it’s been installed, is in the OnBase Studio. This is where we’re basically going to define just a few things here when we set up this actual approval process. So from an actual workflow, you can add a new queue, and you now have this approval queue essentially, so when you assign your ad hoc user tasks, your actions associated with that. And then once you’ve done that, you can hop up here to your approval processes. Again, this can be used across different solutions, we’ve got one set up for contract approval and we also have one for AP invoice approval. I’ll just walk through some of quick configs here.
First off, you define your document types, your AP non PO invoices in this instance and then you define your user groups. This part is actually very important. This is defining who of the business owners that are going to be managing the actual updates to the maintenance of the actual matrix and the hierarchy, so who get assigned to what. This is a great benefit, you don’t see this in a lot of other solutions, so it’s important to assign the right people to manage that approval matrix on a go forward basis.
From there you have your approval users, who’s actually going to be using the tasks from the Approval Manager. And then your keyword types. So we can’t assign anything to anyone unless we have some kind of context around that. So in an invoice approval process, you know we’ve basically pulled in a lot of keywords that we can define where invoices go, to who, based on maybe even a GL account if you’re doing line level approvals. For our example, it’s something as simple as just the invoice total. You can also pull in unity form fields and then lastly, you’ll define your notification criteria. Who’s going to be getting it, how often, things like that.
So if we hop into the client, we see our workflow. We’ve already got one invoice here waiting for GL coding, but what I really want to point out is the actual Approval Management drop down that you have available now. With this again, I have access to everything so you can see of, but you can define who can see what, and who can modify which approval matrix. I’m going to go ahead and select AP invoice approval, and now you can see here, we’ve kind of got a small matrix built out to kind of define where these invoices should go.
The way this kind of works is you can set up multiple paths. Within those paths, you can set up multiple levels. Within those levels, you can set up multiple users to be assigned these specific tasks. It’s fairly easy to do for your business administrators who will be updating this. If they are able to do simple if/then statements to define certain criteria, they should be able to handle this.
So I’m going to go ahead and do one real quick. I’m just going to add a new level. We have a non PO invoice pass, we’ve defined that it’s a non PO invoice. And now we want to add a level, let’s just say this is non PO invoices greater than $5,000.00. From there you’ll make an evaluation type. We are defining this based on our keywords. So we’ll select a specific keyword we want to actually set that criteria, so invoice total. And then for our operator, something like greater than or greater than or equals to is fairly standard. And then we define that value there. And lastly all we have to do is add an approver. Add myself to this and there you have it.
These can get as complex or as simple as you need them to be. One thing to note here is that when I updated this, those changes take effect immediately. There’s no services restarts or anything like that because it’s built in directly with the workflow, you should see these changes come across.
One other thing to call out here is that you can actually import from a CSV, existing approval matrices, so if you’ve got this logic and hierarchy built out in an ERP, like it’s in Law Center, PeopleSoft, or maybe you were just maintaining another flat file somewhere else, this can be leveraged to import that hierarchy so you don’t have to necessarily build up everything from scratch from the beginning.
Along with defining this, you can also, if you have more than one person defined for a specific level, you can define if anyone can approve it, or if everyone must approve it. And if you go into actually do the approval process, we’ll hop back over into workflow. I’m going to go ahead and submit this invoice for approval, it’s going to pop over here in my invoice approval queue. I’m going to find the specific one I had here. And from here, you have your just standard task action lists. You can approve, reject and of course, send to exceptions.
That concludes a short demonstration of OnBase Approval Manager. Hope you’ve enjoyed it. If you have any questions, please reach out to RPI Consultants at any time. Thank you.
