Approvals in Oracle Fusion

What is Approval Management?
Approval management is used to determine the policies that apply to approval workflows for particular business objects such as expense reports. For example, you can specify levels of approval for expense reports over a particular amount, to reflect your own corporate policies. You also determine the groups of users who act on these workflow tasks, for example, the chain of approvers for expense reports.

Approval management is an extension of the human workflow services of Oracle SOA Suite.

Approval is based on certain key elements shows as below:

Transaction Type: These are the set of activities/ operations we perform on any task such as Invoice Creation in Payables, Purchase Order Creation in Procurement, Hire an Employee through HCM. All these activities require authorization if setup as per business requirements.

Rules: These are consisting of business requirement conditions and their respective actions like if an invoice amounts more than a 1000 $, it should go for approval process else not.

Conditions: These are typically an event on which approval process triggers such as if an employee is hired in R&D department, it should trigger the approval process.

List Creation: This is the determining factor like who and till what level approver would route to. There could be a Chain of Authority or a supervisory hierarchy going up to 4-5 levels.

Task Operations: What we expect the Approvers to do, once they have an approval to perform, this is decided by the task operations we have in the system. There could be several actions, we could expect the system to perform once the approval condition is met such as Approve/Reject, Request for Information, Delegate, Escalate etc.

Multi-Level Approval

Above picture shows, how a multilevel approval works, a transaction is submitted, at first level, either it is approved or rejected. If it is Approved, it is routed to the next level and the same process is repeated. If it gets rejected at any level, the process is terminated.

Approver Types

You can include any number of approvers of various types in your approval sequence. This topic explains each of the approver types.

Managers

You can include the following predefined types of managers in your approval sequence:

• Line manager
• Resource manager
• Project manager
• Regional manager

If your enterprise defines additional types of managers, then they appear automatically in the Approvers section of the Manage Approval Rules page and you can include them in the approval sequence.

Approval Groups

You create approval groups using Oracle BPM Worklist. When defining your approval sequence, you can enter the names of one or more existing approval groups.

Users

You can include one or more Oracle Fusion Applications users in the approval sequence.

Responsibility Holders

You can include holders of the following predefined responsibilities in your approval sequence:

• Human resources representative
• Benefits representative
• Union representative
• Payroll representative

If your enterprise defines additional responsibility types, then they appear automatically in the Approvers section of the Manage Approval Rules page and you can include them in the approval sequence.

Human resource specialists assign responsibilities to workers using the Manage Areas of Responsibility task. A worker becomes an approver for a transaction if he or she has that responsibility for the transaction subject. For example, if you specify that the benefits representative is an approver for a promotion, then the benefits representative of the worker who is being promoted is invited to approve the promotion.

Positions

If you include a position hierarchy in your approval sequence, then position holders are invited to approve the transaction. For positions with more than one position holder, the transaction is approved by the first position holder to approve.

Approval Rules:

When using the Manage Approval Rules and Notifications interface, you can specify one or more approval rules for each approver type. To create additional approval rules, you either add a new rule or duplicate a selected rule and edit it as appropriate. When you create multiple approval rules for an approver, they are evaluated individually in an undefined order.

Approval rules comprise one or more IF statements and one THEN statement.

IF Statements

IF statements are tests that determine when an approval rule takes effect. For example, you could specify that an approval rule for a promotion takes effect when the worker's department is Sales or the worker's job is Area Manager. The values in the IF statement are those belonging to the worker's proposed new assignment.

You can specify multiple IF statements. If you join multiple statements with "and" operators, then all statements must be true before the approval rule takes effect. If you join multiple statements with "or" operators, then only one of the statements must be true before the approval rule takes effect.

THEN Statements

THEN statements determine:

• How individual approvers of the specified type are identified
• Any actions that approvers are expected to take

Credits: Oracle Docs