How do you handle approvals when the approver is not available to action it.

[riskay123]

I was wondering what is best practice or how other organisations manage approval in workflows when the approver is not available to action the approval.

Example:

1. Requester logs a catalogue item where they have selected an approver from a reference field on the form.
2. The flow has an approval in it that routes the approval to the selected approver.
3. The approver is not available to approve (on leave) and has not added someone as a delegate.

Someone in the assignment group can manually add a second approver on the RITM once this person has been identified but my question is more along the lines of how we remove the need to action the first approval.  What is the best way to address this type of issue.

Currently the System Admins are having to go in and Approve/Reject the approval record for the initial approver in order for the workflow to continue. This is very annoying, and I was thinking that surely there must be a better way to handle this.

Would love to hear about how your organisation handles this type of thing.

[Weird]

To be honest I'd simply press for the company to make it mandatory to add delegates if someone is on a longer leave.

To have a working setup you'd need to know that the user is on leave and your approval flow could check that and route the approval to someone else. How do you currently figure it out? Does someone just tell you they haven't received an approval?

[Jaspal Singh]

Hi,

As suggested in comments before, ideal is to create Delegate for the user and the Delegated person can then action stuff.

[Brian Sorensen]

We run into the same issue
Here is our teams working flow
Email the Requestor and the Manager's Manager

Email template looks like

Hello X & Y,

It looks like MANAGER is not available to approve the following;

Summary of the request

If you can reply to this email to approve this, we can push this forward.  We would also like to update our records, while MANAGER is off, is there someone that should monitoring their approvals?

We then go into the User table and update the Delegate option