Unified Approvals in Microsoft Teams

Before

There are many separate business processes in the company that require approval processes in their own application.

Managers and top managers had to use different applications to perform each approval process.

It caused the following challenges:

The inconvenience of the approval process and top managers’ dissatisfaction.
Hanging the process when the approver did not have time or forgot to approve the request.
Regular onboarding of new employees to operate in all apps.
Mobile approval is not available for some apps.

Solution

Service consolidates approval requests from all corporate applications in a unified single-window application - Microsoft Teams.

Key Unified Approvals features:

Accepting an incoming request for approval from an existing corporate application.
Building an approval chain based on existing corporate application data.
Providing brief information about the request with the link to the approval source.
Saving all requests and approval history in a single database.
Sending back approval statuses and error notifications to the original source.
Creating and sending to the requester approval printed form if needed.
Notifications and reminders.

After

All employees can perform approvals in a unified single-window application - Microsoft Teams. This significantly reduced approval time and the number of delayed approvals.

When all requests come into Microsoft Teams managers can easily approve them one by one.
Requests from all applications are handled in a unified form – an interactive card.
The approval form contains all the necessary information to make a decision. If the approver needs additional data – they can use a direct link to the original application.
All actions can be performed from a mobile device.
All approval requests can be viewed in a single unified application. You can track the status of the request, the request owner and the approver.

New service is developed on Power Platform and Microsoft 365 using native Microsoft Teams tools:

New service doesn’t require the implementation into the current IT infrastructure and installation on user devices.
No technical updates are needed while adding new approval sources.
It doesn’t require additional development when changing the approval chain.
Microsoft Teams updates don’t affect the solution architecture.
No additional administration from IT needed – only Microsoft Teams license assignment for the approver.
Delegation workflow: for example, when the approver has a day off or on vacation.

Approved request (mobile view)