Approval Task

In many end-to-end business processes human intervention is required such as for approving documents, managing exceptions, or performing activities required to advance the business process.

The document approval request tasks allow you to send approval requests to approvers enabling them to make decisions and thus advancing the request-to-pay business process.

You create different approval task for each approval need, based on the business it serves. For example, you might create approval tasks for purchase requisitions approvals; expense reports approvals, and so on.

In the Setup and Maintenance work area, use the following tasks to set up approvals for procurement document objects:

• Manage Requisition Approvals, found in the Approval Management and Self Service Procurement functional areas

• Managing Purchasing Document Approvals, found in the Approval Management functional area

  • Use the Managing Purchasing Document Approvals task to create approval rules for both agreements and purchase orders.

Based on your unique business requirements, administrators can choose to send the approval request to approvers in parallel or in sequence. Approvals can be sought using single approver, supervisory chain, position, job level hierarchy, or using a list of approvers.

This figure shows the structural hierarchy of the components used in setting up an approval request task: Stage, Participant and Rule.A stage includes a dimension, participant and rule.The participant includes a routing type, voting regime and rule.The rule includes a condition and action.

Stage

Use stages to organize approval routing rules into logical groupings. Each stage is associated with a dimension. A dimension contains a set of attributes at a specific purchasing document level, such as header or lines, which can be used to author routing rules. Approval actions within each stage must be completed before entering the next stage.

Participant

There can be many participants within a stage. Properties set on the participants determine whether approvals would be routed in serial or in parallel.

Oracle Fusion Cloud Procurement is seeded with one or more participants within each stage to enable flexibility in document approvals routing.

The following are two properties defined on a participant:

• Routing Type: The supported routing types are: Serial, Parallel and FYI. FYI participants can't directly impact the outcome of a task, but in some cases can provide comments or add attachments.

• Voting Regime: The supported voting regimes are: Serial, Consensus, and First Responder Wins.

Rule

Approval rules are routing policies or rules that determine the approvers or FYI recipients for a business transaction.

• Condition: The IF clauses in an approval rule and evaluated to either true or false. For the rule to apply to a transaction, all of its conditions must be true. An example of a condition is: If requisition approval amount is less than 500 USD, or if requisition approval amount is between 500 USD and 10000 USD.

• Action: Instruction to include a given set of approvers within an approval rule.