Purchasing approval workflow for multiple projects with different approvers

Kurt Jensen July 10, 2020

Our purchasing department serves about 25 different project/account teams, each of which may have two to four individuals with approval privilege. I would like to set up one central project, "Purchasing" where a purchase requestor can specify which project/account the request is for and who the approvers are. Ideally, when the project is defined, the application auto-populates the approver fields, and notifies each approver via email, Slack, text message or similar.

Projects and associated approvers could be pulled from a spreadsheet type list. We have AD groups, but managing them is very centralized and pulls unnecessarily on key resources.

I do not want to set up a separate purchasing project for each account. Ideal flow:

1. Requestor selects the project from a drop-down list, and completes entry of data such as requested date and attaches a document with details of items to be purchased

2. Workflow auto-populates the approver fields

3. Requestor submits (saves) the request and workflow notifies the approvers

4. An approver approves the request and name & time is captured in the request

5. Request is executed by Purchasing with status updates, such as "PO placed", "Received", "Closed" etc. with appropriate time stamps.

Is this possible?

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David Fischer
Community Leader
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July 10, 2020

It certainly is possible with the help of a workflow app such as JMWE, ScriptRunner, etc. 

Are you on Server/Data Center or Cloud?

Kurt Jensen July 12, 2020

David,

Thank you. We're on a cloud server. Do you have any suggestion for which workflow app might be the best choice for me?

I'm a relative newbie at this and as an organization, we have gradually increased our use of Confluence and Jira since about a year ago. I have limited resources and funding available to get a basic Purchasing workflow running to see if it works for us. There are plenty of apps out there which are purpose-built for Purchasing, but I much prefer not to spread our operations across too many applications because this invariably leads to data sharing challenges, duplication and high maintenance costs. I'm a strong believer in Single Source of Truth.

If I have one single concern about Atlassian, it is that it is so rooted in software development that nomenclature and processes for other business areas risk becoming clumsy and illogical.

David Fischer
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
July 13, 2020

Hi Kurt,

I am obviously biased towards JMWE, as I work for its vendor. You could store the list of Accounts and their corresponding approvers in multiple locations, but the easiest would be a "Shared Nunjucks Template". Then you could use a Set Field Value post-function to add the corresponding approvers from that list (that might require a little help from our technical support).

I've seen Jira being used for all sorts of things, not just IT, so you should be able to use it for this particular requirement. It won't be as "pretty" as dedicated systems, but it'll be better integrated, and certainly cheaper.

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