1. Administering and Working with Oracle Enterprise Data Management Cloud
  2. Administration
  3. Configuring Policies
  4. Approval Policies
  5. Creating and Enabling Approval Policies

Creating and Enabling Approval Policies

You create and enable approval policies on the Policies tab of the inspector for applications, dimensions, hierarchy sets, and node types. The Policies tab for each of these data chain objects contains an empty approval policy for that object, which is disabled by default. You must enable the policy on the data chain object in order to require approvals for that object. You can also create additional approval polices that have different filters to handle conditional approvals of specific data sets by different users.

To create and enable an approval policy:

  1. Open the object inspector for the data object. See, for example:
  2. On the Policies tab, perform an action:

    • To enable the default approval policy, click the name of the approval policy. By default, this is Approval.

      The approval policy is displayed in the policy inspector.

    • To create a new approval policy, click Create. From Policy Type, select Approval and enter a name and optional description for the policy. Click Create.

  3. (Optional) On the General tab, click Edit and then change the policy name or description. Click Save.
  4. On the Definition tab, click Edit, and define the policy settings.
    Field Name Valid Values
    Enabled Allows you to enable or disable a policy without affecting the policy settings. By default, this is set to False.
    Approval Method
    • Parallel: Approvers can approve in any order at the same time.
    • Serial: Approvals must be given one at a time, in the order of the users and groups listed in the Policy Groups list.
    • Ownership: Approvers are invited to approve based on an ownership property on each node. See Understanding Ownership Approvals.
    • Management Hierarchy: Approvers are invited to approve based on a management hierarchy from a Users type application. See Understanding Management Hierarchy Approvals.
    One Approval Per Group (Serial and Parallel policies only)

    Serial policies:

    • Selected: Only one approval per policy group is required. The Total Required field is automatically set to the number of groups listed in Policy Groups.
    • Deselected: More than one approval from each group is required. Specify the approvals required for each group in the Approvals Per Group column in the Policy Groups list.

    Parallel policies:

    • Selected: Only one approval per policy group is required. The Total Required field is automatically set to the number of groups listed in Policy Groups.
    • Deselected: More than one approval from each group is required. Specify the total approvals required across all groups in Total Required.
    Ownership Property (Ownership policies only) The property that determines the node owner who will approve changes on each node.

    The property must be a Node data type property with the User subtype (see Node Data Type Subtypes).

    Management Hierarchy Node Set (Management hierarchy policies only) The node set that contains the management hierarchy to use for approvals for this policy
    Fulfillment Type (Management hierarchy policies only)
    • Fixed: The policy is fulfilled after a specified number of approval levels has been met. Enter the number of approval levels required to fulfill the policy in Fulfillment Levels.
    • Variable: The policy is fulfilled when a specified fulfillment expression returns a value of True for the user node in the management hierarchy. Enter an expression to evaluate after each approval in Fulfillment Expression. If the expression returns False, the policy invites the next user in the hierarchy. If the expression returns True, the policy is fulfilled.
    Total Required The total number of approvers required across all users and groups.
    • If One Approval Per Group is selected, this field is automatically set to the number of groups listed in the Policy Groups list.
    • If One Approval Per Group is not selected:
      • Serial policies: This field is automatically set to the total number of approvers across all groups that you specify in Policy Groups. Use the Approvals Per Group field to specify how many approvals are required for each group.

      • Parallel policies: Specify the total number of approvers required across all groups.

    For Ownership and Management Hierarchy policies, this field is automatically set to one approval per owner (for Ownership) or user (for Management Hierarchy) and cannot be changed.

    Include Submitter Select to specify that if the request submitter is also an approver, the submitter's approval is granted automatically.

    For example, if you select this option on a policy that requires three approvals and the submitter is part of an approval group on that policy, the submitter's approval is granted automatically and the policy will require only two additional approvals before it can be committed.

    Note:

    If Include Submitter is disabled, the request submitter is not invited to be an approver even if they are listed on the approval policy.

    This setting is not applicable to Management Hierarchy policies.
    Allow Enrichment During Approval Select to enable approvers to enrich the request by adding, modifying, and removing request items according to their permissions and data access. See Understanding Request Enrichment.
    Reminder Notification Enter the number of days that will elapse before a reminder email is sent to the current invitees.

    Note:

    If this is set to zero, reminders are not sent to current invitees if they do not take action on an approval.
    Approval Escalation Enter the number of reminders that will be sent before the request approval is escalated to a user with Data Manager permission to the data object in the policy.

    Note:

    If this is set to zero, requests will not be escalated for timeouts.

    See Policy Reminders and Escalations
    Policy Order Assign a number for the order of the policy. Policies with the same number are fulfilled as a group. When all of the policies in a group have been fulfilled, policies with the next order number sequentially are evaluated. See Understanding Policy Order.
  5. In Policy Groups, click the Add a policy group drop down list to add users and groups to the approval list.

    Note:

    Groups that do not currently contain any users are indicated by a empty group icon icon. Service Administrators can assign users to the groups in Access Control. See Overview of Access Control in Administering Access Control for Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Cloud.

    If you selected Serial as the approval method, approvals must be given in the order specified in this list. You can drag and drop to reorder the users and groups in the list. You must click the user or group first, and then drag it to the desired position.

    Note:

    The users and groups in this list are granted Participant (Read) permission on the data objects in the policy.

    Note:

    For Ownership and Management Hierarchy policies, the Policy Groups list is empty and cannot be changed.
  6. (Optional): For Serial policies where One Approval per Group is not enabled, use the Approvals per Group field to specify the total number of approvals required for each group in the list.

    The Total Required field is automatically updated with the total of all approvers across all groups.

  7. Click Save.
  8. (Optional) On the Filters tab, click Edit, and define action filters and node conditions for the policy.

    • In Included Actions, clear the All check box and, from the Included Actions list, select actions to add. Action filters enable you to set up approvals for only the actions that you select.

    • In Properties, perform an action:
      • Select All to invite users to approve whenever any properties are updated.
      • Select Include and then select specific properties to invite users to approve only when those properties are updated.
      • Select Exclude and then select specific properties to invite users to approve when any property except the ones that you selected are updated.
      • Select None to specify that users should not be invited to approve based on property updates.

      Note:

      The request item base action does not have to be Update in order to use the Properties filter. For example, if your Properties filter includes the Core.Description property, then any update to the description property will qualify for the property filter, even if the base request action was an Add or an Insert.

    • In Node Condition, click Define Expression define expression to launch the expression builder. Because you are evaluating nodes in the viewpoint where the action was performed, you use the node object in the expression builder.

      The expression builder guides you to create an expression that evaluates to a Boolean value only. See Building Expressions.

    • In Request Types, select the type of requests that this policies applies to, or select the All check box to apply the policy to all request types. See Request Types and Process Flow.
      • Consolidation
      • Import
      • Interactive
      • Load
      • Subscription
    • Click Save.