This step waits for a person. It is the generic yes/no gate: hold the work order until somebody signs off.
It appears in the Add Step list as Approval.
| Automatic? | No - somebody approves or rejects |
| Who does it | Whoever the approval is assigned to |
| Needs first | Nothing. It asks a question and waits |
| Produces | The decision |
| Where you work it | Pending Approvals, or the work order page |
What it does
Use it anywhere the job must not continue without a person agreeing - before an expensive order goes out, before a customer's unit is scrapped, before anything irreversible.
It asks for nothing up front. It has no products, no stock and no documents; it is purely a gate.
Completing it
- Approved: the step completes and the work order carries on to the next slot.
- Rejected, on an approval you added yourself: the whole work order is cancelled. Not just the step. This is the most commonly missed thing about it - a rejection is a stop, not a branch, because the engine has no branching.
- When an approval was raised by another step rather than added by you, the answer goes back to that step and it decides what happens next.
When not to use it
- You want the job to take a different route depending on the answer. It cannot - a work order is a straight sequence, and a rejection ends it. If you need two outcomes, that is two WorkFlows.
- You are approving a repair parts cost - there is a dedicated step for that which does the totalling for you.
- You just want somebody told. That is an Instruction.