We’re experiencing a frustrating issue with our recipe management workflow in Teamcenter 12.3. When recipe changes are submitted for approval, the workflow progresses normally through the initial stages but consistently halts at the manager approval level. The workflow task appears in the manager’s inbox but remains in a perpetual pending state even after the manager attempts to approve it.
I’ve verified that the manager has the correct role assignments in our workflow template and the user permissions seem properly configured. We’ve checked the workflow task assignment rules and they appear correct. However, the approval simply won’t complete and move to the next stage.
This is causing significant delays in our recipe release process, impacting production scheduling. Has anyone encountered similar workflow task assignment issues with manager-level approvals? I’m wondering if this could be related to workflow engine configuration or if we need to restart certain services.
We had something similar happen last year. In our case, the workflow handler for the manager approval task had a configuration issue where the participant resolver wasn’t correctly identifying the manager role. Check your workflow template’s participant assignment logic. Also verify that the manager user account has the required privileges on the recipe object itself, not just workflow permissions.
Before restarting the workflow engine, I’d suggest running the workflow consistency check utility. In TC 12.3, there’s a workflow audit tool that can identify orphaned tasks or inconsistent workflow states. Also verify that your workflow template version matches what’s deployed on the server. We’ve seen cases where template updates didn’t propagate correctly, causing approval stages to malfunction. The audit tool might reveal the root cause without needing a service restart.
Thanks for the suggestions. I checked the EPM task properties and found that the task owner is set correctly. The method server logs show some warning messages about workflow handler execution but no explicit errors. The manager’s group membership is unchanged. I’m starting to think this might require a workflow engine restart as suggested initially.
I’ve seen this behavior before in TC 12.3. First thing to check is the workflow task state in the database. Sometimes the task gets stuck in an intermediate state that’s not visible in the UI. Can you verify the manager’s group membership hasn’t changed recently? Also check if there are any workflow process exceptions logged in the method server logs around the time the approval attempts were made.
This sounds like a classic workflow engine state synchronization issue. The task may have been assigned but the workflow engine’s internal state machine didn’t properly register the assignment. I’d recommend checking the EPM task object properties directly using Query Builder to see if the task owner is actually set correctly. Sometimes the UI shows one thing but the underlying object has different values. Also look for any custom handlers or actions that might be interfering with the standard approval process. If you have any workflow customizations for recipe management, they could be causing conflicts with the manager approval stage.