Understanding Transactions and Approvals

The system uses the generic Approval Framework to manage approvals for federal self-service transactions. The Approval Framework is a tool for creating, running, and managing approval processes. Approval workflow is triggered when a requester submits a transaction, such as a promotion. The application hands the transaction over to the Approval Framework, which finds the appropriate approval process definition and launches the approval workflow. The approval process definition controls who must approve the transaction and in what order. Administrators have the ability to monitor the status of Approval Framework approval transactions and to perform various actions on submitted transactions.

See Understanding Approvals.

PeopleSoft eProfile includes three federal self-service transactions that include Approval Framework approval processing:

• Name change.

• Address change.

• Marital status change.

See Understanding WIP Management System Setup.

The federal work-in-progress (WIP) management system works in tandem with approval processing to automate the tracking and processing of personnel action requests as they move through the steps of the approval process. Each transaction is configured to use specific WIP statuses at each stage of the approval process.

Because the Approval Framework is a generic workflow approval engine, additional setup outside of the Approval Framework is necessary so that you can associated federal work in progress statuses with approval steps.

See Defining WIP Statuses for Approval Steps.

In PeopleSoft HR, the Personnel Action Request (PAR) system automatically routes a wide variety of requests to reviewing officials in human resources. PAR processing is separate from the Approval Framework approval process and occurs only after all Approval Framework approvals are complete, at which point a component interface automatically pushes the transaction data to the PAR tables.

To support the push to the PAR system, you must provide default values for certain fields that are required in the PAR tables and that are not normally entered by the employee who originates the self-service request.

See Defining PAR Tracking Data.

This process flow diagram illustrates how employee self-service transactions first go through Approval Framework approvals, then get sent to federal PAR processing before any data changes are made to core HR tables:

The Approval Framework controls the approval processes for both manager and employee transactions. PeopleSoft delivers fully configured approval processes (including WIP statuses) for all of the U.S. federal self-service transactions. As long as you use the delivered approval processes, no additional configuration is necessary, but you can use the common Approval Framework pages to review (or modify) the delivered configuration.