Document handling

We put all our engineering project documents in PDMLink and the majority stay at In Work.  However, there are a few of the documents that our group leaders manually sets the state to Approved.  They are analysis reports.  The reason we do this is so people outside of engineering can see them.  The group leader knows to set the state when the engineer sends them an email.  The problem is many times the group leader forgets to set the state of these documents.

We have workflows set up for our CR's/CN's but not for documents.

I am wondering if anyone else does something like this and if so how they handle it.  I know we could create workflows but we would have to get our partner company to create them.  I'm not saying we won't do that but I am looking for a better and simpler (less expensive) option.