We are back again with another exciting Employee Center Pro update, this time sooner than expected! The June 2023 release is an out-of-band release of a new capability, called Approval Hub, available only with Employee Center Pro. This article provides an overview of the Approval Hub capability and features included with the June 2023 release.
Approvals Hub – a unified inbox for approvals across Enterprise apps |
Employees often need to navigate through multiple different applications to manage their approval tasks, each offering a different, disjointed experience. The new Approvals Hub capability creates a unified approvals inbox that consolidates approvals from multiple external systems into the existing My Tasks view on Employee Center Pro. It follows an architectural framework that creates an omni-channel experience with the approvals being available through the portal view, Mobile, or as an actionable notification on email (i.e., Outlook) and Microsoft Teams (via Virtual Agent). It is also designed to be configurable so the admins can make the appropriate information and actions available for each approval type.
At an architectural level, the implementation has been segmented into four layers, as described below starting from the bottom layer: – 1) The integration, 2) the data model, 3) the configuration layer, and 4) the experience or UI layer.
- The integration layer - Approvals Hub leverages the integration hub and existing spokes to build the integration with external applications.
- The data model layer - This incudes custom flow that fetches data from the third-party system (like Concur) and inserts them in ServiceNow data tables.
- The configurations layer - This configuration layer is same as the configurable approvals experience we delivered as part of our August 2022 release for Employee Center. Admins can configure different sections on the to-dos or approvals page to display the request-specific information according to individual task type. In addition, admins can embed custom widget on these sections or even source this information from different data tables.
- The Experience or the UI layer - Finally, Approval hub is designed to provide an omnichannel experience to approvers across various channels like portal, mobile, Microsoft Teams, and email.
This framework for Approvals Hub will ensure to bring in approvals-related data from third-party systems like Concur, Workday or Ariba, complete the approvals within ServiceNow, and then update these third-party systems back with this record.
We will be sharing additional details on this framework soon.
In our 2023-2024 roadmap, we plan to build several pre-built integrations that organizations can leverage to build their own Approval Hub experience. Our first integration is with Concur and is delivered as part of the June 2023 release.
Pre-built integration with Concur for Approval Hub |
With the new pre-built integration with Concur, employees can review the full expense report and approve/send it back directly from ServiceNow, without having to log into Concur. They can approve or send back, after checking the expense line item and itemization, directly through their channel of choice and send remarks in case they are sending it back to requester.
On Employee Center Pro, the full itemized report, along with an option to view attachments for a line item or the full report, can be directly accessed from the My tasks page.
For Mobile, the Concur expense report approval task is available natively on their Now Mobile app with the required details for employees to review and act upon. The approver can review the concur expense report, line items for the expense report, itemizations, and comments on the expense report along with the attachment without leaving that channel and provide their approval along with their comments.
We have also built an actionable message for Outlook – employees can receive their approval tasks from Concur directly in their email, along with all the relevant details to make an informed decision without having to go to any portal.
Similarly, employees using Microsoft Teams can receive an actionable notification, via the ServiceNow Virtual Agent, with the required details to do the approval without having to leave Microsoft Teams. Please refer to product docs for additional details on the same.
The integration is designed such that all these channels are in-sync. An approval completed in one channel will be reflected as completed in all channels.
How to deploy the Concur Integration for Approval Hub
Licence requirement:
The pre-built Concur integration requires Employee Center Pro License; no additional Integration Hub license is required.
Applications/Plug-ins required:
We have released a new ServiceNow store application called the Approvals Hub Integration with SAP Concur. Download this application to get above Concur integration for Employee Center Pro and Actionable Notifications for Microsoft Teams (via Virtual Agent). The original SAP concur spoke will be automatically downloaded with this new plugin. Refer to product docs for additional configuration details.
To get the mobile experience of the Concur Integration for Approval Hub, download the June 2023 release version of the Now Mobile Plugin (version 28.1.2) in addition to the store application Approvals Hub Integration with SAP Concur. Refer to product documentation for additional details on this.
For the actionable messages on Microsoft Outlook for the Concur Integration, download the June 2023 release version of the Outlook Actionable Messages Plugin (version 4.0.2) in addition to the store application Approvals Hub Integration with SAP Concur. Please note that for using approval hub capability with Microsoft Outlook, customer instance must be on Tokyo family release or a higher version. Refer to product documentation for additional details on this.
The pre-built Concur integration provides a great framework that ServiceNow partners and customers can follow to build integrations with other applications to create a true unified approvals inbox for employees.
