Forms :: How To Set Up Approval Process With ACCESS Form Features

I am considering the possibility of revamping the employee onboarding & off-boarding process for our organisation to make it more efficient.

Current State: We use InfoPath forms in SharePoint Servers 2010 to handle onboarding/employee change/off-boarding requests submitted by the related department. With the Workflow process, the respective manager will receive email to approve the requested intake form and once it is done, the form will be assigned to someone in the business support team for processing. Once all the required logistics are completed, we shall enter the new hire's profiles into our MS Access employee database through an employee input form.

It works well although it seems like a duplication of work since the support team has to manually input the employee information, which is already captured on the InfoPath form, into the Access database. We also need to align the field options (such as data on drop down lists) in the InfoPath form with similar field on the input form in the database whenever there are new field added or changes made on existing fields.

Future State: I wonder if there is a way in Access to set up a similar request/approval process so that we can get rid of the InfoPath form when the requester can input the employee information on a onboarding intake form in Access with data stored in a temporary table. After the request is approved and subsequently completed by the business support team, we can say, click a button and transfer the employee data from the temporary table to the employee table. Of course, some sort of validation rules should apply before the transfer takes place to ensure data integrity.

I think the major challenges would be to build an approval process within Access to provide similar notification features as from InfoPath.

I know this might be a wild thinking but just want to look for possible options to save manual work and improve the efficiency of our process.