What software handles requests that need approval and several departments?
Some employee requests take several steps: first the manager's approval, then work by facilities, IT, or accounting. Right now these requests are forwarded by email, and the only way to see where each one is is to read the thread. What kind of system should we choose so the route works without manual forwarding?
10 November 2026
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3 min
Expert answer
Director of Business Products, SimpleOne; ITIL 4 Master, ITIL 3 Expert, Practitioner
An enterprise service management (ESM) system: the employee submits a request on a shared portal, and the approval and department tasks all run in one system. When choosing, check approval before work starts, handoffs between departments without forwarding, assignment to a department group, whether you can see who has the request, and whether the route runs on the same portal as IT.
What the options are
- Email and shared spreadsheets. The route depends on people's memory, and only whoever has the request right now knows its status.
- A task tracker in each department. Each department manages its own tasks, but approval stays in email, and a handoff to another department is a new task in someone else's project, so the link to the original request is lost.
- A separate request system for each department. The route works within a department and breaks at the boundary between systems: the employee has to submit the request again.
- A document management system. It's strong where the route follows a document that needs a signature, such as a contract.
- A business process management (BPM) system. It builds approval routes for any process and fits when routes are complex and tied to documents. Standard department services with due dates still need a service catalog.
- A shared service portal for all departments: ESM platforms, such as SimpleOne ESM. One portal for every department, and each task has its own assignee and status.
The general requirements for such a system, such as one entry point for the employee, a catalog for each department, and access control, are covered in the answer on choosing a system for requests to non-IT departments. Below is only what matters for the route.
What to look for when choosing
- Approval before work starts. Check: can you make an employee, a group, or a role the approver, and set a decision rule?
- Handoffs between departments without forwarding. Check: can a department pass the work to the next one inside the system, without forwarding an email or creating a new request, and does the task keep its full history? How to test this on onboarding, where HR, IT, and facilities each do their part, is covered in the answer on handling HR requests together with IT and facilities.
- Assignment to a department group. The task goes to the department and is distributed among staff without a dispatcher. Check: how does the system pick the assignee, in turn or by workload?
- Visibility of who has the request. Check: does each task show the group, the assignee, and the status, and does the system count reassignments so you can find the steps where requests bounce around?
- The same portal IT uses. Check: how many systems will IT and the departments have to support after launch?
At ITG Corporation, the ESM platform includes automated approval and routing processes. Across the project, request processing time in the connected departments dropped by 24%.
How it works in SimpleOne ESM
SimpleOne ESM is a set of SimpleOne platform tools for managing internal services. Department work in it is handled as tasks:
- a task has an assignment group, an assignee, and a status, as well as counters for group and assignee reassignments;
- the system assigns the assignee automatically, in turn or to the least busy person in the group;
- approvers can be employees, groups, or roles, and the decision rule is one approval, all approvals, or a majority;
- the approval widget on the portal and in the agent interface shows all approvers and their decisions;
- due dates are set in service level agreements (SLAs), indicators warn in advance about the risk of a breach, and the manager sees goals and KPIs on traffic-light scorecards.
If the company uses SimpleOne ITSM, the IT service management system, the employee orders the service on the same portal where they submit IT requests, the manager approves it, and the department fulfills it within the SLA.
How to describe the route, assign a request owner, and see where a request is stuck is covered in the answer on routing a request through approval and several departments.
