Automate document approvals by multiple parties

Finalizing and approving documents can be chaotic when there are multiple parties involved. With Nintex for Office 365, you can create an automated process to guide your document through as many reviews as it needs.

The process starts when an author uploads a new document that has to be reviewed to the SharePoint Document library. The document has to be reviewed and approved by two teams to get final approval. All the actions for the two teams are captured in two states of a State machine action.

If the document is:

• Rejected in the first review state, the workflow sends it to the author for revision.
• Rejected in the second state, the workflow sends it back to the previous review state to be reworked.
• Approved in the first review state, the workflow sends it to the next review state.
• Approved in the final state, the workflow exits the review process.

You can update this workflow solution to create as many states in the review process as you need.

This step-by-step solution builds the workflow that automates your document approvals.

Step by step

Step 1: Open designer to create workflow Open the Designer for a list workflow to create the State machine workflow.	Show me
Step 2: Add the review stages Add the State machine action and configure it to have two states for the two teams that has to approve the document.	Show me
Step 3: Assign task to Team A to review the document Assign the task to Team A reviewer when the document is uploaded to the Document library.	Show me
Step 4: Team A approves and sends the document to the next state Team A reviewer approves the document and sets next state to send the document to the Team B reviewer.	Show me
Step 5: Team A rejects document and sends email to initiator The Team A reviewer rejects the document and sends an email about the rejection to the workflow initiator who uploads the document and exits the State machine.	Show me
Step 6: Assign a task to Team B to review document Assign a task to Team B to review the document after Team A approves it.	Show me
Step 7: Team B rejects and sends document to Team A Team B reviewer rejects the document and sets state back to Team A to receive a task notification.	Show me
Step 8: Team B gives final approval and sends email to initiator Team B reviewer gives final approval to the document and sends an email to the initiator and exits the State machine and review process.	Show me
Step 9: Configure start options Configure the start options for the workflow.	Show me
Step 10: Publish and test the workflow Publish and test the workflow.	Show me