How does Approval Mirroring work?

Your systems of record are designed to hold the audit trail & your business logic. It’s where your IT, HR, Finance, and other teams creates the processes needed to ensure effective business operations. Moveworks makes sure to respect your approval workflows by only integrating with your approval records.

Imagine the following approval workflow that first captures an approval from a team of admins, and then the employees manager.

Moveworks does not want to make you replicate all the business logic & validations. Instead, your Moveworks AI Assistant will take just the last mile, the approval record, and make it happen faster.

Usually your employees will be notified via email about a pending approval.

Moveworks funnels this approval through chat, making it happen in MINUTES, not days.

Integrations

Moveworks built a first party integration into ServiceNow and enabled additional integrations through Creator Studio, to ensure expedited approvals across your systems. Based on the business processes & information needed to be shown to the user, Moveworks can integrate with a category of “resources” at a time. For example:

Approval Actions

Moveworks' approval action system which can be configured to match your organization’s needs.

Action Buttons

Approvers can directly approve or deny their approvals from their Moveworks AI Assistant with the click of a button. These buttons will trigger an API action which will approve or deny the approval request.

Moveworks also supports comment buttons, which can collect a mandatory justification from the user before applying the “approve” or “deny” action.

Link Buttons

If the approval requires the user to navigate to the portal, Moveworks can produce a deep link to the approval in your system of record. This is popular for scenarios like delegating the approval to another individual or looking up additional information before approving.

Note: Once the buttons have been configured to redirect the user to a link, those buttons will always redirect the user instead of triggering the API action.

You can see your integration-specific handbook for configuration option details.

FAQ

Q: How does approval detection work?

A: Moveworks checks for approvals every 60 seconds, with a 60 second look back period. This means that at 12:02PM, Moveworks will check for approvals that were created between 12:00PM and 12:01PM.

Moveworks designed our pollers this way because systems of record will often automatically approve dozens of approvals ~30-45 seconds after they're created (based on different business rules your organization has set up). This avoids noisy notifications on approvals that aren’t actually needed.

What is the SLA?

Our system periodically checks for updated approvals, however, there are any number of reasons approval records may be missed such as: system timeouts, or permission issues.

When Moveworks pollers misses an approval record, users will not receive a notification & they will not be able to retrieve that approval record by asking the Moveworks AI Assistant.

Q: What data is stored?

A: Approvals stores the following information:

Identity Information

When a user interacts with the Moveworks AI Assistant, we need to know who they are in the other system. For example, we might receive messages from a user in a chat platform asking us to take an action (e.g. approve something). The chat platform tells us CHAT_USER123 messaged us, but we need to figure out who they are in your integration.

To do this, we link three things together:

CHAT_USER123 = [email protected] = WORKER123

Approval Information

As we detect approvals in your integration systems, we store the notification data in our Approval Queue.

See our Data Handling & Deletion documentation for the most up-to-date data retention details.

Q: What happens if a user clicks on an approval that’s already been completed?

A: Like in email, it’s possible for an approval to no longer be required after the notification has been sent.

To avoid disrupting your system of record, Moveworks does not update the approval record if it has been already completed. If your integration supports comments, Moveworks will add a comment indicating that the user expressed an intent to approve / deny the record, but we did not apply the update because their approval was no longer required.