UT Department System: Routing Help
The Routing List and Routing Setup screens of the UT Department System are designed to display, create, or update the departmental document routing for a given department.
Routing Concepts
Initial Routing
The routing sequence (path) controls who must approve a document before it goes to the next level of the departmental hierarchy. All documents may follow the same routing, or different variations may be set up for specific documents or document originators.
When a document is created, it is routed to the desks defined as the departmental route of the department being reviewed or changed. The system sends the document to each desk defined on that route, in order, one after the other. The document awaits approval at each desk before going forward. While it is on their desks, approvers may take other actions on the document as well, such as sending FYI copies or returning the document to its creator. These options are discussed separately below.
When the document has been approved by every desk in its initial path, it then follows a route up the hierarchy to each of the departments reported to by the initiating department.
Route Selection
As the document moves through the hierarchy, the routing system retrieves the set of routes defined for each department in the chain of approval. From this information, the system determines the specific route whose definition most closely matches the combination of the type of document being routed and the originating department.
If the system cannot find a route that exactly matches the combination of document type and originator, it will look for more generic routes defined with the wild-card characters "." and "*"'.
Once the best route has been found, the system routes the document through the chain of desks as it did for the initial, departmental route.
Final Approval
After all of its hierarchical superiors have given their approval (or opted not to), the document reaches the Processing Office, where it is checked for completeness and accuracy and, if appropriate, finally approved.
Routing Setup Privileges
Anyone may view a department's routing information, but only the Managers of that department or the department(s) that it reports to may make routing changes. If a user is eligible to update routing information for a given department, appropriate links display in the user's view of the Routing List page.
Routing Field Guide
Department Code refers to the code of the department that owns the routing being viewed. This should not be confused with the Originator field (below). The field title serves as a link to a pop-up "pick list" that automatically populates the field with the code of a selected department.
Routing Type sets the types of routing being viewed.
- Departmental routes are the initial routing level, internal to the department being changed. For changes to sub-departments, the departmental routing of the sub-department's parent department will be used. Routing for specific sub-departments may be defined by creating a new route within the parent's departmental routing with the sub-department designated as that route's originator.
- Dean/ Vice President routes define the paths of documents that originate in departments that report to the department whose routing is being viewed. If a document originates in a given department and completes its departmental routing, it will move up the hierarchy by selecting the appropriate route from the list defined in the Dean/ Vice President routing of the departments that the originating department reports to. Again, if the document originates in a sub-department, it will route along the path defined by its parent department. For example, if Anthropology reports to Liberal Arts, a document created in ANTH will route to LBAR; if Liberal Arts reports in turn to the Provost, the document will - upon completing the LBAR path - be routed in turn to EVPP.
- Processing Dept routing defines the route taken by a document when it reaches the processing department or document experts. To set up processing routing for a document implies that the department whose routing is being viewed has final authority over documents coming to it from whatever departments are specified as originators. In practice, all departmental documents will follow a route to the end of their hierarchies and then be routed to the Processing Office defined for the system.
Form Name is the code of the type of document: Official Departmental Document (DDO), Departmental Document Review (DRO), etc. In addition to the specific types of forms defined in the system, two wild card characters are available to define more generic sets of routes - the period (".") may be used to stand in for any one character while the asterisk ("*") stands in for the entire form name. The system will use these more generic routes whenever it fails to find a more specific route to apply.
Examples:
- "*" = all document types
- "D.." = all departmental documents
- "DR." = all departmental review documents
- "DRS" = only sub-department review documents
Note: You cannot replace the middle character without replacing the last character (that is, form names such as "D.O" are not allowed).
Originator specifies the department that initiated the change or review request. By specifying the originator, managers have the option to route the same type of documents to different sets of approvers. In this way, documents routed to the Provost (EVPP) from Anthropology (ANTH) may be seen by a completely different set of approvers than the same type of documents that come to EVPP from Astronomy (ASTR). As with Form Name, the asterisk may be used in the Originator field to denote that a given route applies to documents of a given type from any originator, but only when a more specific route cannot be found.
Examples:
- "ASTR" = documents created by Astronomy will take this path
- "*" = documents from any originator will take this path if no more specific routing is defined.
Desks These fields provide the names of the desks that documents will go to for approval before moving to the next route in the hierarchy. The sequence of desks will be followed in in order from left to right and the document must pass the previous desk to move to the next one. If the manager wants to opt out of the routing path of some documents - perhaps from specific sub-departments or documents of a specific type - then the value "*IGNORE" may be entered, causing documents that select that route to move immediately to the next routing sequence in their hierarchy. Desks for use with this routing system may be created and maintained in the *DEFINE US1 command, or existing *DEFINE desks may be used to receive documents from this system.
Status is defined in parentheses beneath the desk name whenever the status is anything other than the default. Approval (APP) is the default role - or status - of any desk entered into a route, but managers also have the option of entering FYI or notification desks into their routes. FYI desks do not have to approve a document but will receive an information copy whenever the document is approved by the desk immediately preceding them in the route. If that desk has already seen that document, no information copy will be sent. Notification desks work in precisely the same way, except that notification copies will be sent regardless.
Examples:
- FYI = Information copy to this desk unless the document has already been seen
- Notify = Notification copy to this desk regardless of prior interaction with the document
Note: These help pages are linked to the UT Department System Glossary.