Time-limit on Approvals

[cornflakes_01]

I'm hoping someone has a best practice here for me.

Our organization is currently struggling with approvals for equipment not being approved by some of our business managers. Our list of requests that have been orphaned continues to grow.

We're looking to put in some automation to cancel the request after a certain period of time. The workflow would be:

Approval Requested --- 3 Weeks Later ---> If un-answered, reminder email to the manager with the approval within --- 3 Weeks Later ---> Final reminder to manager, warning that the request will be cancelled in 2 days if un-responded ----> Request Cancelled automatically, end user and manager notified of cancellation due to lapse of approval.

Originally when scoping this, I thought using an SLA would work perfectly on this circumstance, but I now notice that only Task extended tables are available for SLAs. So now i'm thinking of using the condition checker to set a status field on the approval records after the different time periods, and fire the approval event when those conditions hit.

Has anyone done something like this before? I think the condition checker will work perfectly, but i'm just wondering if someone has a better solution.        

[Nivlac1000]

We're looking to do something similar.   We have the same issue.   We were going to work within specific Catalog Items.   I'll be watching this and post anything we find that's useful.

Cal

[geekgirlst]

I'm trying the solution from here:   Approval Reminders:   I didn't go through as many timers as you, but it appears to work.

[jlampson]

I haven't tried this, but someone from ServiceNow stated that you could use Certification Tasks (Data Certification - ServiceNow Wiki) to accomplish this. Apparently, they can be used on any table, not just the CMDB. Disclaimer: I haven't tried them. Good luck!

[cornflakes_01 · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the responses folks, I didn't realize I hadn't marked this as answered. We ended up using the due date field and a expiration level field on approvals to run our check. In the workflow we set the due date to 6 weeks ahead. We then have a scheduled job that runs daily to check and see how far away the due date is. Depending on how far the due date is, we set the expiration field as such, and have emails set up on the approval table as the expiration level changes to send email reminders when the due date is 3 weeks away, and another for when the due date is 3 days away. If the approval expires, we set the approval as such, and add a comment to the effect that we've cancelled the request due to inactivity.

If you'd like the code, you can msg me, as this editor isn't playing nice with pasting my code.