Workflow if then to select Approver

Question

Within our organization are three departments: Dept 1, 2, and 3. These three departments will use the same workflow. 
 However, when an employee sends a document for approval and selects Dept 1 in the metadata. I would like the approver to be the Manager of Dept 1. The same goes for Dept 2 and 3. 
 I'm trying to come up with a workflow that can do this. One option I could do is to create 3 separate workflows. However, all three will follow the same process and the only difference is the approver. I'm trying not to have 3 workflows to update every time there is a change in the process. 
 What is the best way to implement this?

bright-ideas.dk · Accepted Answer

Assuming you have a Department object type and that you have Manager as a property in the Department Class you should be able to use indirect references for the approver like this department.manager.m-filesUser

dejan · Answer

As we have similar use cases, I could as well highly recommend what bright-ideas suggested. I would highly recommend to first step back and design whole business structure in form of object types before designing first document types. This would force you to think about your business, business dependencies and possible metadata to describe documents. After that solutions are quite easy to design and flexibility is re-usable.

ssential · Answer

Totally agree. We resisted initially to create a Department Object (We actually use smaller Team Object) 
 When we first launched M-Files, we just used a single select value list for our Departments - huge headache - don't recommend. 
 We now use a Team Object, which is related to the Employee Object. The employee object is tied to our Active Directory and updates every night. Some employees are managers - so there is a property on the Employee object that indicates this. The Employee also has a terminated date. 
 The best benefit of this approach is for those situations when an employees works with more than one team. This approach handles this so documents that are restricted to Team 1 or Team 2, then can access because they're a 'member' of both

Workflow if then to select Approver

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