Today’s workplace is remote, distributed, and constantly shifting, which means a flexible way to route documents for approval is no longer a nice-to-have. It’s table stakes, regardless of a company’s size.

At most companies, even when documents are fully electronic, approval routing often isn’t. Documents get emailed out for approval, or a shared spreadsheet tracks who’s signed off on what. More often than not, “signing” means pasting in a JPEG of a signature (very insecure), with someone manually coordinating the process from one approver to the next.

We recently introduced Veladocs.flow, a built-in review and approval capability for Veladocs, to fix exactly that. That post focused on documents that live in Veladocs as their system of record. But plenty of organizations have a different situation: they’re not looking to move their documents at all. They already have systems of record they trust, and those aren’t changing. What they need is a better way to route documents for approval. These organizations are looking for a common approach to support approval of documents that reside across many different applications without building approval functionality into every one of those applications and repositories individually.

That’s the use case we’re covering here.

The customer problem

We’ve talked with a customer, a nuclear power operator, whose executive leadership is looking to add approval functionality for documents that live across a range of applications and storage locations. Multiple aging systems exist to provide review and approval workflows for critical documents, but these systems need to be replaced soon. Other systems don’t have approval functionality available, and building custom approval functionality into each one is either too expensive or simply not feasible. So, like most organizations with this kind of need when a workflow solution is not built-in, employees have found their own workaround: emailing it around and either printing, signing, scanning, and uploading or pasting a JPEG of a signature into a document. The JPEG signature is highly insecure, and the overall process becomes unwieldy quickly when a document has many approvers or requires several rounds of sign-off. With today’s remote and mobile workforce, what’s actually needed is something more secure, more robust, and capable of reporting status. Not all of their existing systems do that.

Their systems of record are staying put. What they want is to stop relying on email and manual methods to gather signatures, and replace it with one consistent way to route all documents for review and approval, regardless of where those documents actually live.

How it works

Veladocs.flow is built around three roles, which map naturally to how approval actually flows through an organization:

An initiator brings a document into Veladocs.flow as a draft, uploaded from wherever it actually lives, and sends it into review, defining who needs to weigh in and in what order.

Approvers work from an inbox of tasks assigned to them, reviewing each item and either approving or rejecting it. Rejection sends the document straight back to draft, so downstream approvers never waste time reviewing something that’s already been sent back for correction.

Administrators get a reporting view into how approvals are actually moving, including the ability to reassign work when someone’s out or overloaded, and can configure approval roles so the process reflects how the organization actually operates.

On the signature side, Veladocs.flow supports full eSignature capture, as well as a simpler upload-your-signed-copy option for organizations that need digital or wet-ink signatures.

Once every approval is complete, the finished, signed document is downloaded from Veladocs.flow and placed back into the system of record it came from. Audit trail information can also be exported and stored in the system of record as well. The approval experience is identical to what we described in our first post; what’s different here is what happens before and after: a document comes in from an outside system, and the finished result goes back out to it.

Where this is headed

Right now, that “before and after” step is manual: someone uploads the draft, someone downloads the result. That’s a reasonable starting point, and it solves the immediate problem. But it’s not the endpoint.

We’re exploring connectors that would automate both ends of that process. For example, with a system like OpenText Documentum, where Veladocs.sync already has a working integration, a document could be pulled into Veladocs.flow as a draft automatically, and pushed back to Documentum automatically once approved, with audit events written back to the source system along the way. The approval process would sit on top of the source system almost invisibly, with a record of who approved what, and when, preserved wherever the organization needs it to live.

This is the direction we’re building toward: one consistent approval experience, regardless of how many systems of record an organization is running underneath it.

See it in action

The demo videos below walk through the Veladocs.flow experience described above. We’ve broken the walkthrough into four short videos, so you can jump to the role that matters most to you.

Note that the specific scenario shown in the walkthrough is illustrative. While the demo scenario focuses on document review and approval for a Nuclear Operator, Veladocs.flow can be configured for any organization’s approval roles and processes.

Overview (under 3 minutes)
A quick tour of Veladocs.flow, overviewing the initiator, approver, and administrator roles.

The initiator’s view (under 5 minutes)
See how a document moves from draft into the review and approval cycle, including how approval roles and order get defined.

The approver’s view (under 5 minutes)
A look at the approval inbox, task prioritization, and how an approver processes tasks.

The admin’s view (under 5 minutes)
See how reports and actions such as task reassignment are available to system administrators.

Interested in learning more?

If your organization is juggling approval processes across multiple systems and looking to consolidate, we’d like to hear about it. Contact us to talk through your process and see where Veladocs.flow fits.