Approvals in Fusion Procurement

Key features exist in Fusion Procurement approvals

There are many useful features that can be used with Fusion Procurement. Here are just some of the more significant examples:

  • Both Serial and Parallel Approval for all document types.
  • Various ways to configure responses, including features like first responder wins to help avoid lengthy processing times.
  • Notification by email as well as several rich dashboard components (e.g. worklist) to show items currently awaiting action.
  • Expiration, reminder and escalation features on pending actions.
  • Delegation and vacation rules to forward actions to dedicated proxies as needed
  • Rich notification content including clickable links to go directly to document details.
  • Wide range of attribute values to use in the creation of custom approval processing rules.

What hierarchies can be used to generate approval lists?

Fusion Applications provides standard support for the following methods to derive the list of approvers

  • Supervisor Hierarchy. This uses the HCM employee definition, leveraging the specific assignment of a supervisor person to each employee. AMX engine calls HCM to request the users that are in the hierarchy and passes in a starting position (normally the person submitting the purchasing document) and the maximum number of levels in the hierarchy to climb up.
  • Position Hierarchy. This uses the Job definitions in HCM and selects all employees tied to the position that gets included in the selected hierarchy. Again this accepts the starting position (person) and the top job level to climb to before completing.
  • Approval Group is simple a group of predefined people. This can be a static list or may be custom to generate at run-time based on approval document attribute data.
  • Job Level. This works very similarly to the Position Hierarchy whereby it uses start and end Job definitions to traverse the hierarchy and select approvers.

What is Approvals Management (AMX)

Approvals Management (AMX) is an independent product that comes from the Fusion Middleware SOA Server, and provides general approval services to any product in Fusion Applications. AMX can be considered the meeting point between the powerful and flexible Oracle Business Rules capability and the advanced process control capabilities of Oracle Human Workflow.
The BPEL process that controls approvals has points at which it invokes the AMX services to initiate the approval process. The BPEL process controls the procurement process around approvals, however AMX and Human Workflow are responsible for the entire approval process.

AMX features include:

  • The execution of rules that govern the selection and generation of approver lists.
  • The sending of notifications to the participants on the generated list.
  • The processing of responses from those approvers, and selection of appropriate next approval action.
  • The return of the completion status back to the Procurement BPEL process for actioning.

Still eRecords and eSignatures are not supported by AMX in version 1.0.

For Complete Details Please refer to Document Approval in Fusion Procurement Products [ID 1319614.1]