Draw the approval, then watch it run

Plenty of tools let you draw a process. The drawing is the easy half. What makes it worth doing is whether the thing you drew is the thing that runs.

What runs

A process in Parsware is drawn on a swimlane canvas and published as a version the engine loads. From there:

• Human tasks are assigned to a role, a team or a person, and arrive in that person's own inbox inside the app they already use.
• Timers and deadlines escalate when nothing happens, which is the case every real approval has and most demonstrations skip.
• Conditions are written in the same scripting language as form rules, report expressions and custom APIs — one language, one editor, one set of error messages.

Watching a run

Every instance has a live diagram showing where it is, and a history of what happened, when, and who did it.

That matters more than it sounds. When somebody asks why an invoice sat for a week, a process engine without a run history turns that into an investigation. With one, it is a screen you open.

One thing worth knowing before you build

A role you grant somebody reaches them through their access token, and a token is only reissued when they sign in. So if you grant yourself the role a process routes work to and your task list stays empty, the product is working exactly as designed and saying nothing about it — sign out and back in.

A role reaching somebody through a team behaves differently: team membership is worked out inside the environment every time it is asked, so it takes effect on their very next action. If you need a change to bite immediately, that is the lever that does it.