Abstract
A year ago, the University of Maryland at College Park began to automate the process for the appointment of faculty and academic staff. A major challenge that arose during system design was how to simulate electronically the flow of paper through the various stages of approval. With several hundred academic units and sub-units on the campus, and varying numbers of review and approval stages, the proposed mechanism would have to handle the most complex of situations.Realizing that there would be other campus-wide applications requiring a similar flow of documents, it was decided that the routing mechanism developed for academic appointments should be generic enough for use in applications such as purchasing, travel, and payroll. It should also provide information across various platforms.This presentation describes in detail the routing model developed, illustrating its use in the academic appointment process. It also addresses issues of implementation and maintenance.