Approval Management in Fusion

Approval Management in Fusion: Points to Ponder:

Oracle Business Process Management (BPM):

The BPM Worklist Application is a web-based application that lets users access tasks assigned to them and perform actions based on their roles in the approval process. Administrators can set up approval groups and task-level configuration via an administration portal or through the Oracle BPM Worklist.

As in EBS suite, we have different types of transactions (“Purchase Requisition Approval”) we have tasks defined for each Transaction in Fusion for example for I-Expenses the task is “Manage Expense Approvals” and for Procurement the task is “Manage Requisition Approvals”.

How to configure or edit Manage Requisition Approval process:

Navigate to: Setup and Maintenance > Select: Procurement > Setup button > Functional Areas: procurement> Show: All Tasks > Manage Requisition Approvals > Oracle BPM Worklist as shown below

Click on the Manage Requisition Approvals which will take you to Mange Requisition Approval Set up page as shown below:

You can create new rules by clicking Edit Rules button as shown in above screen shot or by selecting create option from Actions Drop Down.

An approval rule is composed of the following:

1.       Rule Name

2.       Condition

3.       Action

Rule Name:

The Rule Name is used to identify the approval rule.

• In cases where there are large numbers of rules, users can filter search results in the Query by Example fields.

Condition:

The Condition indicates when the approval rule will be applied.

A rule can contain multiple conditions, and you can select the “and” or “or” operators to indicate if all conditions in the approval rule must be true or if only one condition must be true for the approval rule to apply.

For example, if the requisition amount is less than 10,000 and requisitioning BU is US Business Unit. A condition can be defined using attributes seeded in a dimension or user-defined attributes. Please look into the section on how to create User Defined Attributes.

You can create the condition by using predefined Approval Task attributes or by using User Defined Attributes.

You can serch for any standard attributes and can create the condition as shown below.

Action:

An action defines what needs to be done if the conditions of a rule is met.

It identifies if approvals or FYI notifications are required and the type of users needed to approve or receive notification for a document.

The supported action types are: -

·         Approval required

·         Approval actions required from the recipients of the approval tasks - Automatic

·         Automatically approve or reject the approval task - Information only

·         FYI notifications sent to recipients

In the below screenshot you can see we created Action based on Condition

The Supported Routing Methods are:

·         Approval Group

·         Job-Level

·         Position Hierarchy

·         Single Approver

·         Supervisory Hierarchy

User-Defined Attributes

Organizations have different requirements for document approvals. Some of these requirements may include the need to perform currency conversions for amount based attributes or derive approvers based on a roll-up amounts across lines within a document with common attributes. These user-defined attributes are managed and used within a specific approval task.

There are two types of user-defined attributes they are:

·         Currency Based

·         Summation.

Currency Based on User-Defined Attributes:

You can define currency based attributes such that amounts indifferent currencies are converted to a specific currency for the rule evaluation.

For example, Acme Corp. creates an attribute “USD Requisition Amount” and uses the attribute for rule conditions, such as if USD Requisition Amount is less than 500, approvals from the preparer’s manager is required and so forth. If a requisition created in Mexico is submitted, where the functional currency is pesos, the requisition amount will first be converted to USD before rules are evaluated.

Summation User-Defined Attributes:

Customers who need to perform approval routings based on data aggregated across one or more attributes when a document contains more then one line, schedule or distribution can create summation user-defined attributes.

For example, Acme Corp’s approval policy requires the number of IT approvers to be based on the total amount of IT requests within a requisition. If the total IT amount is less than 1200 USD, then the IT manager needs to approve. If the IT amount exceeds 1200 USD, then the IT manager, director, and VP need to approve the document.

Deploying Approval Rules:

Any changes made to the rules or any rules that have been newly added have to be deployed for them to be effective.

·         Deploying approval rules will require users to Click on the Deploy button on the Edit Rules and on the Manage Approval Rules page.

·         If users do not intend to deploy the changes that were made to the rules, they can choose to click on the

·         Discard button to revert the rules to the last deployed state.

Save: Save or Save and Close will save the updated rules to the database without deploying them. Users can edit and save rules across multiple participants before deploying them.

Deploy: Deploy updates the rules engine and makes all the rule changes across all participants effective. It is displayed on both the Manage Approval Rules page and the Edit Rules page. The Deploy button is disabled by default and is enabled when there are rules that have been setting up Document Approvals updated and saved.

Discard: Discard is displayed on both the Manage Approval Rules page and the Edit Rules page. It is disabled by default and is enabled when there are rules that have been updated and saved. Discard removes any rule changes that were saved and the rules will go back to the last deployed state.

Once You Click on Deploy The below warning Message will Appear.

Click on the Confirmation Dialog Message.

Once the changes are deployed, the rule will be effective once by enabling (Enable) button adjacent to “Edit” button where you created or edited the rule as shown below.