Approval process With time dependent work flow

Question

Requirement is a 5 levels of approvals in Approval Process . Once the record is submitted, it has to go first level appprover and after he approved it has to go to the next level i.e. 2 nd level Similarly the process continues next 3 levels. And also with that if the first level appprover has not approve with in 72 hours immediately the approval process goes to next level[2nd level] automatically. If any level of approvers has not approved the record the approval process has to move next level After 72 hours. We have tried using Time dependent work flow with Approval Process but workflow is not firing after 72 hours.and we are not able to see any record in Time based work flow Queue. Is it possible in standard Appproval process ?or need to go for custom approval process?

Answer 1

I think you're going to want to create a custom approval process for this. You have too many decision "forks" to attempt to use a simple approval process.

If you refer to the Chapter 9 of the Force.com Platform Fundamentals Workbook theres a nice tutorial that covers all the steps necessary to create a custom multi-level approval process. That chapter also covers Workflow that you might want to review as well since the two are related to what you're doing.