Internal approval is often of interest to companies who are doing some engineering on behalf of their customer. They want to work with their suppliers to ensure the documents are correct, prior to sending them on to their customer.

When enabled, an internal approval cycle is initiated when cards are first received by your company (from suppliers or other 3rd parties). Cards are sent to your users (via routing), who in turn apply an internal status (similar to customer statuses). The cards are then queued for return to their source. After return, if cards have been “approved”, they continue their workflow to be sent to the stage target (generally the customer).

Using Internal Approvals

The first step is to enable the option for your company. This is done through the admin screen – general options.

Set up internal approval list

Internal approval status lists are created on the Internal company.

The APPROVED checkbox has the same function as the complete checkbox on the customer return status list. It indicated the card may continue on its workflow after return to its source. There is also a PENDING option which must remain. That status is applied when cards first start the cycle. 

These values can be changed to your companies statuses. The default values are A, P, R; but could be 1,2,3,4 or A,B,C,D or whatever your company wishes to use for approval statuses.

Enable internal approval on  stage list

The internal approval workflow is enabled on any specific stage. Simply check the “Internal Approval” checkbox. 

Apply default routing

After saving, you will be reminded to choose a default routing for each such stage. This allows a default selection of users who will apply the approval statuses. These can be changed on any card.

Internal approval workflow

Upload document, and apply approval status

When a document is assigned to a card with internal approval workflow, the user will see 

1) The approval status set to “Pending”, and 

2) The list of reviewers for the approval cycle.

As the document makes it way through the outstanding actions for each of the reviewers, they will have the opportunity to add markups, and assign/change the approval status. Once all reviewers have completed their review, the document will be queued for return to the original source. In this case, the source of the document was Sub-Supplier, so the card will show in the out to sub-supplier queue.

Return to source

Once all reviewers have completed the actions, the cards will be placed in the outbound queues. If the have an APPROVED status, then once sent to source, they will move into the outbound to customer queue, and normal workflow will be enabled.

Variables

New variables are available for the Sub-supplier/Internal cover sheets and transmittal documents. These show the internal approval status of the document, so your submitters know whether the document has been approved or rejected. 

If this sort of DocBoss functionality would benefit your company, contact us to tell us how we can help you.