Approvals are a sticky topic during an implementation, and the struggle doesn’t go away quickly once you are live. The first thing users want to do is figure out how to buy their stuff, and the approvals is one of the more frustrating parts of this process as the requester sends it off into the void. Some people view it like a blackhole, like the suction tubes at a bank, and they are quick to blame any delay or issue on the new software. Meanwhile, approvers also struggle to understand what comes to them, and why. Sometimes they are overwhelmed by the volume and in seeing the information to take a decision, and their delay causes a backup from which it can be difficult to recover.
At Huron, I’ve helped drive a suite of reporting that simplifies and clarifies this process for everyone involved. It starts with a comprehensive report of approval rules, followed closely by a chart of cost center owners or project managers, and their supervisory hierarchy complete with job name and job level details. For day to day action, there is a robust report showing pending approval actions and the current actor, along with details about why they were chosen. Finally, for audit purposes, reports showing whether delegations were done properly to equal or higher job levels, and the ability to audit the full approval tree based not only on document number, but also on any included approver.
Approval rules themselves are highly complex if done in the front end, Functional Setup and Maintenance or FSM; and practically a nightmare if done in the older BPM module. Consultants and Subject Matter Experts must take the legacy rules, which may be unique for each department or area, and map those to Oracle Cloud, which may come with new concepts or missing older ones. The rules must be streamlined and aligned across departments, and take into account current pain points and issues that must be addressed in the new software.
Having an easy way to export the rules, showing the conditions and the outcome, not only makes it easier for the client to approve that the expected work was completed, but consultants can validate their own work, migrate data more easily to other environments, and even use with change management to alert users of the upcoming changes.
That, combined with the cost center owner/project manager reporting, helps assure users that Oracle is not capriciously deciding on where to send things, but always following strict rules and logic. The Cost Center Owner and Project Manager report makes it trivial to export the full list, or allow users to search based on the cost center or project, to see the current owner or manager. For approval trees based on approval authority by job level, its easy to go from the approval rule export to this chart to see how many levels up must approve by dollar amount, and the username of the user. These two together help with the barrage of support tickets that come in the first weeks after go live, where users claim “my document went to the wrong person!” and help you fix any supervisor issues quickly with HCM and Finance.
The Pending Approvals report is one that should definitely come built in by Oracle; but since it doesn’t, my team at Huron is here to help! It shows all pending approvals, the time since it was last acted upon, along with lots of details about the approval such as dollar amount and description. It works for the most critical approval flows, like requisitions, invoices, purchase orders and change orders, and more. This is key for managers to review to see where approvals are getting blocked in the organization.
After the fact, there are two big areas for audits: delegations and approval history. These reports let you easily see whether someone delegated to another user with a lower job level. This report is best suited for daily or weekly audits as it relies on information in the shorter term BPM tables; while the document by document or by included user report will work for any amount of time as it pulls from archive tables. With this, you can easily see the full approval tree for any requisition or invoice based on the name of one included user.
Approvals management is key to client success, and that’s why I work with my team at Huron to deliver these critical, custom reports to our clients.