Change Order Approval Process

A change order can be approved only through the successful completion of an approval routing.

When you create a change order, an approval routing is created automatically based on approval rules or manually by any user granted the Item Change Order Management Duty privilege.

An approval routing consists of one or more approval stages. Each approval stage specifies a workflow process and assignee. For example, you can create stages to request approval or request comments. You can also create stages having the Interim Approval status.

Skip Request Comment is available in open status. When checked, request comment notifications aren't sent to the seeded assignees.

If Skip Request Comment is enabled and autopromotion is defined for open status, on submission of the change order from draft, the change order will be pushed to the status set for autopromotion.

After changes are authored for each item, the change order is submitted for approval workflow.

When a change order is submitted, notifications are sent out to assignees. Consolidated notifications are sent to each of the appropriate assignees at each stage of the approval process. Each approver is requested to respond before the expiration date specified in the approval task in AMX. Reminder notifications can be set up so that an approver who doesn't respond by the required date can receive notifications at a specified interval.

The approval status of a change order reports the progress of the approval. A list of approvers and the action taken by each approver is captured as a part of the history displayed in the notification for approval.

The approver can approve each line in the change order or reject the change.

Note: The Product Development work area doesn't support approval of change orders at the line level.

You can set up a task so that when the change order is approved or rejected, an email notification is sent to the creator, requester, and assignee. If the approval routing workflow is stopped, then a task can be set up so an email notification is sent to all people in the approval routing who were previously notified regarding an assigned workflow process in an approval stage.

You can set up a change type so that a request is approved by a single member of a user group. From the Manage Change Order Types task of the Setup and Maintenance area, edit a change type and select an approval step on the Workflow tab. Then, for an approval activity in the step's status details, set Response Required From to One. When one member of a group approves the change, the notifications to other approvers in the group are withdrawn for that approval step, and notifications are sent to the approvers for the next step.

The assignment of approvers for change order lines is governed by rules. For change order headers, you can select an assignment method in the Interim Approval or Approval step's status details for the Header approval stage, either rules-based or user-defined. If you choose user-defined assignment, you then select an approver by using the Assigned To control.

You can assign approvers as optional. A single optional approver can reject a change order, but approvals from optional approvers are ignored. To assign an optional approver, select an approver by using the Assigned To control on the Optional approval row of the Interim Approval or Approval step's status details.

Note: For change orders in Draft or Open, their lines can be moved to a new change order or to another existing change order, if those lines are hindering the approval workflow.

If Response Required From has been set to One, then, when an approver selects the Claim action on a notification, the notification is locked against changes by other approvers, unless the first approver unlocks it by selecting the Unclaim action.

On interim approval and approval notifications for change orders, the Pack Type column of the Items table is hidden by default. To view the pack type associated with the items in a change order, select Pack Type from the View menu.

You can navigate to the items in the change order approval notification using the item link. The resulting read-only item page is rendered in a separate window. The first view on an item drill-down from a notification is the item view, to view the changes in the context of the entire item (as supported by the change order). Then you can toggle to an item view that displays changes.

Approvers can only see those aspects of the item for which they have access. They can also perform the following tasks on the change order:

• Request more information

  When you request more information from a user, the user must submit the information using Actions > Submit Information (available on the change) so that the change can be approved.

  Note: If a message appears during the approval informing you that the action is invalid or the user doesn’t have the privilege, review the change history. Identify if more information was requested from a user. The change can be approved once the user submits the information.

• Reassign

• Escalate

• Suspend