Workflow Sample: Google Map for the 'Pathway' in Business Trip Application

"Business Trip Application" is complicated and cumbersome.

You may be required 'Prior Approval', or may need 'Advance Expense (cash prepayment)', or the company may arrange certain type of tickets ... The proceeding is troublesome than anything. If you try to extend the schedule as personal trip, you will totally not understand what you should submit.

On the other hand, your Boss or Accounting personnel who receive the "Business Trip Application" won't be so happy. It will be hard enough only to check expenses and detailed travel plan. The words of "travel plan" are already nonsense because anyone can change their reservation at anytime, anyplace. Also in Expense Settlement processing, there no longer is a necessity for advance cash because most of the purchase can be paid with 'Company credit card'. If you need a settlement, you'll claim it in Travel Expense Report of afterward.

In the Workflow below, it is focused on 'abolishing Advance cash', and on giving Prior Approval on [Overview of Travel].

What is excellent on this workflow is, destinations of the travel plan (place name) that entered can be referred in Google Maps. Because "travel route" and "travel cost" can be understood with one click, "person who gives approval (the Boss)" or "person who does audit" can understand the business trip summary instantly.

[Business Trip Approval flow]

This Workflow Sample has only few input items.
You can imagine that nobody would check strictly on 'documents of the detailed business trip plan'. The 'person who gives approval (the Boss)' wouldn't know whether 'where the place names written are'. Even the person who makes the application would have no energy to review if 'there is any leakage in entered data or not'. And the Accounting personnel would be waiting for the indulgence that 'Approval by the approver'...If so, isn't it more rational that a system to give an approval only on 'approximate travel plan'?

Inputting work which you spend three hours every month might be shortened into ten minutes.

When Data Viewer authorization is given to both of them, they might become to be interested in the work of each other. Or it might become to make application by reusing data the past application of their own or others. Reusability will increase also if application data is consolidated in simplicity.

By the way, the 'Button to pass the place names entered in the application screen to Google Maps' is realized by the setting of [Guide panel], which is only for the indication. Anyone who knows JavaScript programming can enrich the application screen like in this example... But be careful that an excessive decoration will lower its maintainability.


<br>
<input type="button" value="Go Google Map"
onclick="searchGMap(10, 11);">
<script type="text/javascript">
function searchGMap(from_num, to_num){
var from_data = 'input[name="data\[' + from_num + '\].input"]';
var to_data = 'input[name="data\[' + to_num + '\].input"]';
var from = jQuery(from_data).val();
var to = jQuery(to_data).val();
var url = 'https://maps.google.com/maps?saddr='+encodeURIComponent(from)
           +'&daddr='+encodeURIComponent(to);
window.open(url);
}
</script>

[Business Trip Approval flow: '1. Travel Plan Application' screen]