Get Started with Workflow Inbox and Tasks

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Describe how business events in Supplier 360 trigger workflow tasks for supplier data changes.
  
• Distinguish between Required and Optional workflow configurations and their effect on supplier records.
  
• Explain how to claim a task and the actions available after claiming it.
  

How Supplier 360 Manages Onboarding Approvals

Maya Pilecki is a Supplier 360 credit manager at Coral Cloud Resorts. When the procurement team signs a deal with a new catering supplier, that record doesn’t go live the moment it’s submitted. Before it can be used for purchase orders, contracts, or compliance reporting, it needs to pass a formal review.

That’s exactly how Supplier 360 works—supplier onboarding happens through a structured workflow approval process. When a procurement coordinator creates a new supplier record, Supplier 360 automatically routes it to the Workflow Inbox for Maya to review and approve. In this unit, you explore how business events trigger these workflow tasks, where those tasks appear, and what it means to claim a task before you begin your review.

From Action to Approval: How Tasks Are Created

In Supplier 360, business events are automated triggers that create workflow tasks when actions occur on supplier records, ensuring data changes go through review and approval processes.

User-triggered events respond to supplier record actions like create, update, delete, merge, or unmerge. When a matching business event exists, Supplier 360 creates a review task for appropriate approvers.

System-generated events are triggered automatically, such as when Supplier 360 identifies potential duplicate supplier records requiring human review.

When events fire, Supplier 360 creates linked workflow tasks that move through configured approval workflows. Stakeholders must review and approve data before it becomes master data.

But what do these two business events mean for your day-to-day work as a reviewer? Every time a business event fires in Supplier 360, it creates one or more workflow tasks—and those tasks land directly in your inbox. What you see when you open a task, and what you’re asked to evaluate, depends entirely on which action triggered the event.

Here’s how the event type maps to what a reviewer encounters.

Required Versus Optional: Does the Change Wait for Your Approval?

Not every business event forces a supplier record change to wait for review. When an administrator configures a business event, they can set the workflow initiation to Required or Optional.

• Required: The record change is held in a pending state until a reviewer approves it. The change does not become master data until the workflow task is resolved.
  
• Optional: The record change takes effect immediately, but the workflow task is still created for informational or audit purposes. Reviewers can still act on it, but the data is not blocked.
  

For Maya, this distinction matters every day. A Required workflow means the supplier won’t appear in any downstream system until she approves the task. An Optional workflow means the record may already be active, and her review contributes to governance accountability rather than blocking the onboarding. As a Supplier 360 credit manager, Maya is responsible for validating financial and compliance-sensitive fields—bank account details, currency type, DUNS number, and ownership type—before a supplier record becomes trusted master data.

Claim a Task

Before a reviewer can take action on a task, they must claim it—a critical step in the workflow. When you claim a task, Supplier 360 locks it to your user session, so other reviewers can’t edit or act on the same task at the same time. This prevents concurrent edits—a situation where two approvers review the same supplier change simultaneously and produce conflicting decisions. Supplier 360 ensures that each task has one owner at a time.

Once you claim a task, you can take one of the following actions.

• Approve: Accept the data change. The change moves forward in the workflow.
  
• Reject: Decline the data change. For example, a rejected merge proposal means the records are not combined.
  
• Release: Return the task to the unclaimed state so another eligible reviewer can pick it up.
  
• Send Back: Return the task to the person who initiated it, signaling that more information or changes are needed.
  

When Maya claims a supplier onboarding task submitted by the procurement team at Coral Cloud Resorts, no one else can act on that task until she approves, rejects, or releases it. But she notices some issues with the supplier record and she wants to resolve these issues before the record enters the master data store.

Sum It Up

In this unit, you learned that business events in Supplier 360 are the starting point for all supplier data approvals. User-triggered events respond to human actions like onboarding, updating, or merging supplier records, while system-generated events fire when Supplier 360 detects potential duplicates. Both create tasks in the Workflow Inbox for authorized reviewers to claim and act on.

You also learned how Required versus Optional workflow configuration determines whether a supplier record change waits for approval, and that claiming a task locks it to one reviewer at a time to prevent conflicting decisions. In the next unit, you follow Maya as she reviews and resolves workflow tasks for each type of supplier record change.

Resources

• Informatica Documentation: Manage Tasks and Tickets
• Informatica Documentation: Define Business Events (Sign-in required)