Workflow & governance
What is approval workflow?
An approval workflow is the review step between submission and printing, in which an operator approves, rejects, or flags a job before any material or machine time is committed to it.
Also known as: print approval, moderation workflow, job review
What approval is for
Approval is a cost gate. A rejected job costs a short review; an unreviewed bad job can consume hours of machine time, material, and another attempt. In a teaching environment, review is also where a student can learn that a part needs supports, a thinner wall, or a different orientation.
Approval without becoming a bottleneck
The failure mode of approval is a queue of pending reviews that nobody clears. Three things keep it moving:
- Clear checklist state so reviewers can see what each job still needs.
- Enough context in the list view to identify which jobs need attention.
- Named responsibility: a role that owns the review, rather than “whoever gets to it”.
The record is the point
An approval that is not logged is indistinguishable from no approval. Recording who decided what, when, and with what note is what makes the operation auditable later, whether the question comes from a finance review, a research reproducibility check, or an incident.