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Approval Workflow

Approvals are often given by person who is assigned responsibility to review and check if the data, record or document that is being passed through his eyes qualify the certain parameters at that stage. Approval workflow process is sequence of tasks that need to be performed either automated or need of human intervention.

Many organizations spent a lot of time to streamline approval process via email or in person approval on hard copies. An automated workflow can turn the things around and streamline the entire manual process. Executing workflow process through application software improves productivity, boost efficiency and help to identify the bottlenecks in the approval process.

Workflow in Liferay DXP

Liferay’s workflow engine is named Kaleo. With the use of Kaleo workflow makes us capable to define any number of simple to complex business processes/workflows, deploy them, and manage them through a portal interface. The processes make use of out of the box Users, Groups and Roles.No need to write a single line of code to accomplish this: it can be defined in an XML document, or if you’re a Liferay Digital Experience Platform (DXP) customer, you have access to a visual workflow designer.

As described in the link  by Liferay.

There are several steps to effective workflow:

• Designing review processes in XML
• Designing review processes in Kaleo Designer
• Uploading workflow definitions
• Activating workflow for enabled assets
• Managing Workflow definitions
• Sending assets through review
• After all that, you’ll be familiar with using Liferay’s Kaleo workflow to set up approval processes for any

Workflow Types

Single  Level  Approval Workflow

The simplest type of approval is a simple workflow for approving a change to a document, web content or record or any other entity. Action at the end of the workflow handle the approval result: Publishing the result or sending a rejection notification to the submitter. Liferay Content management  support these basic document approval workflows, using a document ‘status’ to indicate the workflow result. It also define roles for authors and approvers.

Multi-level Approval Workflow

Approval workflows get more complex when you add multiple  approvers. Like a expense submitted by an employee need to be approved by Manager, Senior Manager and then Executive in a sequence. In this workflow, when the first approver (Manager) rejects a request, the rejection is immediate. After first approver approves the request, request goes in the bucket of second approver(Senior Manager) and so on .  Request is not approved until final approver(Executive) approves the request. If at any level if  approver rejects, request is rejected and workflow is complete. 

Business rules  in approval workflow

This version of the workflow adds one  business rule that third approval tasks is  conditional, and is skipped if the request does not require executive review  If the Senior Manager who does the second approval has authority to spend up to 1000k, In Kaleo Workflow Designer, you can configure a business rule as an ‘automatic decision’ with conditions on value of expense that  if the value of the expense approval required is less than 1000k. In that case after second approval, it will make decision that third approval by the Executive is not required and expense will be finally approved. But if expense value is greater than 1000k than request will be assigned to Executive for third approval. We can use these automatic decision conditions to configure relatively straightforward business rules.