Approval workflows
Define and manage approval workflows to review and authorize actions
Lumel EPM provides the best solutions for collaborative planning and reporting within Microsoft Fabric. There are two main workflows that allow for seamless value adjustments and approvals across multiple users working on the same planning sheet.
When multiple people update the same report, approvals are required to ensure data integrity. The approval workflow feature in Lumel EPM allows you to create a workflow when values in the report are changed.
When a data input or forecast value is updated, you can perform actions such as sending a notification email to a user or updating the status or any values in the relevant fields. When a report user updates a value, an approval/notification email is sent to their manager, and the manager can approve or reject the update by selecting the appropriate status from the manager approval dropdown.
You can create custom approval workflows by either creating scripts or using the intuitive user interface that doesn't require scripting.
1. Using scripts
In Lumel EPM, both data input and forecast columns have a scriptable On Change Formula section where you can specify the actions that will be triggered when any of their values change.
Let's consider the 'Exchange Rate' report below to demonstrate. To create an approval workflow using scripts, we first added the following visual columns:
Task Status is a single-select data input column that has the options 'In Progress' (default option), 'Submit For Review', 'Reopened' and 'Approved'.
The Manager Approval and Director Approval columns are also inserted as single-select dropdown columns with the list of values 'Pending', 'Approved', 'Rejected', and 'Reopened'.
The Manager Email, Director Email, and Associate Email columns are inserted as person-type columns to select the approvers' and the requester's email ID(s).
The approval flow sequence is then scripted in each of these visual columns via the On Change Formula section. This is explained below:
Flow of script-driven approval workflow
After a user enters/updates a value in the 'exchange rate' data input field, the user should set the value in the Task Status column as 'Submit For Review'. The On-Change Formula section automatically runs scripts when data changes in the data input field, and it triggers an email to the manager.
In the Manager Approval single-select column, we’ve listed the actions as a script for each status change through the On Change Formula section.
The SETVALUE function can assign a specific value to a related cell based on a condition. For example, when the Manager Approval status is ‘Approved,’ the SETVALUE updates the Director Approval status to ‘Pending’. Similarly, when the Manager Approval status is ‘Rejected’, it updates the Task Status column to ‘Reopened’.
If the director approves, the task status is updated to 'Approved'. Upon rejection, the status is set to 'Reopened' for both the Manager Approval and Task Status columns.
Notice how the approval-related columns are updated based on the approval or rejection at each level.
The SENDMAIL function will trigger email(s) to the specified recipients. You can optionally provide an email subject and summary, which will be in the email body. The email body will also contain the details of the updated values.
FAQs
Q1. Can I modify the scripting function as per my use case?
Yes, you can customize the scripting based on your specific requirements. The example above uses a simple script to demonstrate how the approval workflow works, but you can extend or modify the logic to suit more complex business scenarios.
Q2. Can I set up this flow without scripting?
Yes, you can create an approval workflow without writing any scripts. The next section explains how to configure approval workflows using the UI.
Q3. Are approval levels configurable?
Yes, you can add and configure as many approval levels as required.
2. No-code approval workflows
Not a fan of scripting? You can easily create approval workflows using the Approval Workflow user interface.
Unlike scripting, Lumel EPM automatically creates single-select dropdown columns and updates the status of all approval levels based on the status of their preceding or succeeding columns through the Approval Workflow UI.
To create an approval workflow, navigate to Plan > Approval Workflow.
Selecting the approvers
STEP 1: Enter the name for the first dropdown column by clicking on the edit icon. This creates a dropdown column with three preset options - Submitted, In Progress, and Reopened - for tracking the task status.
STEP 2: Select the email IDs of the report users who are authorized to update the task status from the search bar dropdown. In this case, 'Status' is a single-select dropdown column, and the requester's email ID is added. This person will be notified of the approver's action via an email.
STEP 3: Create the first-level approval by entering an appropriate column name and selecting the approver's email ID(s) from the search dropdown. In this case the 'Manager Approval' is a single-select dropdown column, and the approver's email ID is added.
Alternatively, you can refer to a text column in the sheet containing the email addresses of users authorized to make changes to these two columns by selecting the Column option, as shown in the image below.
Only when the sheet has one or more text-type columns does the Column option become active for the single-select columns mentioned above. Please make sure you select the appropriate text column that contains the email addresses.
STEP 4: Using the Add option at the top, you can insert the next level of approval, if required. After adding the required approval levels, click Next. In this example, the highest level of approval is the Director Approval.
Customizing approval workflow
STEP 5: When you click Next, you will see a list of options for configuring the rejection and email notification settings.
Reset on Rejection: Enabling this toggle will reset all the previous level statuses to 'In Progress' or 'Reopened' upon rejection. This option is disabled by default.
Email Notifications: You can enable or disable email notifications for approvers and submitters using these two settings. These are turned on by default.
Click Submit to create the approval workflow.
How the approval workflow works
Lumel EPM automatically creates the single-select data input fields with a predefined set of options when you configure the approval workflow as explained above.
In this example,
When a value in the Status column is set to 'Submitted', an email notification is sent to the specified manager, and the corresponding Manager Approval status is automatically updated to 'Pending'.
If the manager approves, an email notification is sent to the specified director, and the Director Approval status is updated to 'Pending'. Alternatively, if the manager rejects, an email is sent to the submitter, and the Status column is updated to 'Reopened'.
The director can approve or reject the changes made. If the director rejects the changes, only the Manager Approval column status is updated to 'Reopened'.
In the above example, if the director rejects the request, only the Manager Approval (previous level) status is updated to 'Reopened', while the Status column value remains unchanged.
To update to the 'Reopened' status in all previous levels, enable the Reset on Rejection toggle and click Update.
Last updated
Was this helpful?