1. Using Procurement
  2. Document and Award Approvals

Document and Award Approvals

Your application may use the approval management system to track and manage approvals of both your negotiation document and your award decisions. You can approve the negotiation document, the negotiation award, or both.

When approvals are used, internal reviewers view and OK the details of the negotiation document and the final award decision.

How Approvals Work

If approvals are enabled, you can have both the negotiation document and the award decision subject to approval before they can be further processed. The Approvals Management Extension is an automated process in which approval checks are passed from a user, a group of users, or the application to another user or group of users for consideration or action. Similarly, after you make an award decision, you can submit it for approval.

When the negotiation document requires approval, you submit the document for approval once you have completed it. When the document has been approved, the application automatically publishes it. The new status for the document depends on the open and preview dates.

  • If the open date is Upon Approval, the status is Active.

  • If the preview, open, and close dates are in the future, the status is Submitted.

  • If the preview is past but open and close are in the future, the status is Active.

  • If the previous and open are in the past but the close is in the future, the status is Active.

For award approval, once the award has been approved, the status changes to Approved, and you can complete the award and generate the purchase documents.

Whether a document or award needs approval depends on the approval rules that are defined for the task (publish or award). For example, a negotiation could be subject to approval because it includes items from a particular category, or an award decision could need approval because the award amount is over a certain limit.

If you're an approver for a document or award, you receive a notification when a document or award becomes available for you to view and evaluate. The notification contains information on the negotiation, attachments, and links for approving or rejecting the document or award. Approvers can download these attached documents from their email notification to make an approval decision.

While a negotiation document is being approved, the status of the negotiation is Approval in Progress. While the award is being approved, the status is Award Approval in Process. If there is an issue and an approver rejects the document or award, you receive a notification with information about the rejection. You can edit and update the document or award and resubmit it for approval. Once the document or award is approved, the status changes to Approved, and you receive a notification that the approval is successful. Then you can continue processing the negotiation:

  • When the document is approved, it's automatically published.

  • You can complete the award and generate the purchase documents after the award decision has been approved.

Note that approvals tasks are different from collaboration team task assignments (although collaboration team members can also be designated as approvers). Tasks that are assigned to collaboration team members are tracked manually and have no effect on the processing of the negotiation by the application.

During both the document approval process and the award approval process, you can monitor the progress of the approvals by viewing the Negotiation Approval Process and the Award Approval Process pages.