Approach to Inactive Approvers

[curtisr]

I have a question regarding inactive users and cleanup/maintenance. What is the best practice or generally accepted method to cleaning up outstanding approvals? For approvers that are inactive do you monitor and clean these up proactively? What do you do when an approval no longer has an active approver assigned to it? Do you set your approvals to expire after XXX days/weeks/months to help maintain some sanity within the system?

We have had SN up and live for almost 18 months now and we now have approvals that are going on a year old, some of which are waiting on an inactive person to approve.

I would like some ideas and feedback on what you do for these situations so I can present an accepted method to management and get this cleaned up.

Thank you so much for the help and support.

[Deepak Kumar5]

You can write a scheduled script and run it weekly or monthly.Here you can check the approval which is 3 months old and approver is inactive by querying on "sysapproval_approver" table.

var appr = new GlideRecord('sysapproval_approver');

appr.addQuery('state', 'requested');

appr.addQuery('sys_created_on', '>', gs.daysAgoStart(90));

appr.addQuery('approver.active, 'false');

appr.query();

while (appr.next()){

  appr.state = 'cancelled';

[curtisr]

Deep,

Thank you for the response. This is exactly how I was thinking this would work. My question is also around how do you and your company handle these situations? I get the technical side, now I just need to show the business this is how these situations are approached by others in the SN community.

Thank you,

Curtis

[Deepak Kumar5]

We don't have anything for this right now.

There are a OOB business rule on Approval table that moot all other Approval if not required based on group approval activity.So very few approval will remain in active state if someone from team approve/reject it.

For personal approval, Records are very less which remain in active state.

[johnnyw]

Hi Curtis,

I was wondering if you ever found any insight on how to handle this.   I am also trying to determine the right path on how to handle approvals that are pending approvers who are no longer active.   Also, even before it gets to that point.   I found that if an approver is terminated yesterday and an request item is submitted today that routes to the terminated user based on them being a manager for example, the workflow doesn't fail, nobody gets notified, no emails get sent, and the RITM just sits pending approval.   Have you thought about this scenario and how have you handled it?

Thanks,

Johnny