Are these groups or people approving a task or just adding information?

Is the information entered by each of them mandatory for completing the approval task?

Hi @ghaiashish,

Thank you for the quick reply. To put it simply, here are the proposed steps I'd like to replicate and build in Nintex workflow and forms:

1. Requestor fills out Nintex form

2. The form is routed to Approver A for approval

3. If approved, the form will be sent to 3 different groups concurrently. Each group will then be tasked with filling out fields in addition to what has already been entered by the Requestor. These 3 groups are working independently from each other.

4. Once each group is finished with their portion of the Nintex Form, they submit their data to one last group. 

Just as a note, this will all be performed with SharePoint as the database, using Nintex Forms and Nintex workflow for Office 365.

Thanks for any guidance you can provide!

You can use nested parallel blocks to distribute tasks to three groups with individual approval tasks for each group

Information to be entered by each group can be done using Nintex task forms

see screenshot

Thanks for the recommendation, @ghaiashish. I was thinking of using State Machines; would parallel blocks make more sense in this type of example?

Hi Medianline,

State machine can definitely be used and that depends on your requirements, please note:

State machine:

1) The downside of using state machine is that you can't create concurrent tasks for groups they need to be serial and dependent on the outcome of predecessor. e.g. workflow will change state to group 2 only when Group 1 approves etc.. This process could take longer if one or more groups act as a bottle neck.

2) The upside of using state machine is approval process is more controlled and robust and groups can feedback their comments and rejections into the other groups e.g. if group 2 rejects it can feedback comments to group 1 for a re-approval

Parallel blocks

1) This I believe is the only way to meet your current requirement of creating concurrent tasks in parallel to three groups

2) Downside of this solution is that, the parallel block completes and sends task to next (final) approver even of one or more parallel users/groups reject the task, which could be a pain/overhead for the next level of approvers. This issue can be mitigated by terminating the workflow on rejection.

In this scenario there is no feedback mechanism/continuity of workflow on rejection.

You have a choice of either solution depending on whether you need the process to be quick or have more continuity feedback mechanism etc.

I hope that answers your question