Before Setting Up Approvals

Approval management uses human workflow to automate tasks that are passed from a user or an application to another user or group for consideration or action. Workflows are routed in a predefined sequence to achieve an end result.

Examples of tasks include approving a time card or completing an employee performance appraisal.

Approval management:

  • Controls workflows for business processes such as hiring an employee or managing promotions.

  • Enables you to define task routing policies that can be as simple or as complex as needed.

  • Is fully integrated with HCM to derive approvers based on the supervisory hierarchy, areas of responsibility (such as HR or Benefit Representatives) and other criteria, such as job levels.

For workflows, Oracle Fusion Applications uses the approval management extensions of the human workflow services from Oracle Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) Suite as well as the Oracle Business Process Management (BPM) Worklist application.

Oracle SOA Suite:

  • Is a comprehensive software suite used to build, deploy, and manage the service-oriented architectures.

  • Provides a human workflow service that handles all interactions with users or groups in business processes.

For more information about using human workflow in SOA Suite, see Developing SOA Applications with Oracle SOA Suite.

Oracle BPM Worklist provides an interface for:

  • Users to access tasks assigned to them and perform actions based on their roles in the workflow.

  • Implementors to perform approval management setup, to define who should act on which types of transactions under what conditions.

About Task Configuration

Task Configuration is a web-based application in Worklist Application that enables business users and administrators to review and modify rules that were predefined by the workflow designer. These predefined rules can be changed for a specific customer based on the customer's applicable corporate policies.

Task Configuration enables you to edit the event driven and data driven rules associated with an approval flow at runtime that's, when the workflow has already been deployed.