An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite Andrea Auld Senior Principal Instructor Oracle University October 22, 2018 This is a Title Slide with Picture and Product, Service, or Industry Logo slide ideal for including a picture and product/service/industry or org logo with a brief title, subtitle and presenter information. To Replace the LOGOs on this sample slide: Right-click a sample LOGO and choose Change Picture. Navigate to the location where the new logo is stored, select desired logo file and click on the Open button to replace the sample logo. The Presented with FPO logo placeholder box can be copy and paste to any of the Title Slides. Confidential – Oracle Internal/Restricted/Highly Restricted

An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite What we’ll cover This presentation will cover (using GL Journal approval as an example): Giving your user access to the Approvals Management Engine dashboard Enabling action types for the GL Journal approval transaction type Creating an approver group Creating a rule with conditions and actions Creating and running a test case in Approvals Management Engine Running a Real Transaction test in Approvals Management Engine Additional resources that you may find useful In this short presentation, I’ll give you an overview of how to setup and use Approvals Management Engine for document approval in E-business suite. Approvals Management Engine can be used for configuring approval in numerous modules – Purchase requisition approval in purchasing, AP invoice approval in Payables, HR transaction approval in Self-Service Human Resources, etc. In my example, I’m going to show you a simple example of how to setup Journal approval in General Ledger, because that is NEWer functionality than the use of AME in modules like purchasing and HR, and because I just taught a class at a bank this summer that has implemented journal approval using AME and it has given them far more flexibility in the routing of journals for approval than they had with journal approval as it worked prior to the availability of AME. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

Assigning the AME roles to your user Log on as sysadmin/sysadmin Choose the User Management responsibility/role and the Users function First of all, your user will need to have access to the Approvals Management Engine business analyst dashboard, which is not a responsibility, but rather a role in User Management. So, you have to log on as a user with the User Management role. I believe when Oracle applications are installed that the SYSADMIN user is created with access to the User Management role. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

Assigning the AME role(s) to your user Search for the user to whom you want to assign AME admin access. Click the Update icon. In user management you search for the user to whom you want to assign access to the AME roles. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

Assigning the AME role(s) to your user From the User Maintenance screen, click the Assign Roles button. Then you can assign the AME roles to your user. There is more than one role, but the Business Analyst role is probably the one that you would use. There is another more technical role that would be used by someone setting up AME from scratch for a module that does not currently use it and for which no transaction types have already been defined. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

Assigning the AME role(s) to your user Choose the appropriate role and click the Select button. Pick the role you wish to assign and click the select button. When you assign roles to a user via User management, it may launch a workflow process which requires approvals if you have configured User Management that way which we have not in our environment. If you’re interested in learning more about User Management (which has some cool features) it is covered in the Oracle University E-business suite System Administration class. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

Assigning the AME role(s) to your user Enter an Active From date and a justification and click the Apply button. The justification you enter is used by the workflow process if you have it enabled. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

Assigning the AME role(s) to your user You may need to run the Workflow Background Engine in order to see the role. It may be necessary to run the Workflow Background engine before you see Approvals Management Business Analyst role when the user logs on, because of the workflow process which executes in the background. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

Enabling Action Types for a Transaction In the Approvals Management Business Analyst Dashboard, choose the Transaction type and click the Rules link. In my example (which I borrowed from a very good white paper I found on support.oracle.com), we have to enable specific actions for the Journal approval transaction type. An action would be something like Require approval from supervisor, or require approval from approval group. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite9

Enabling Action Types for a Transaction Click on the Setup tab and the Action Types subtab. Click the Use Existing Action Type button. So, we are enabling the use of the Require approval from Approver group action for the Journal approval transaction type. There are other seeded action types available but for my example that is the only one that we will need. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

Enabling Action Types for a Transaction In the Use Existing Action Types: Select Action Types screen, choose an Action Type and click the Continue button. So, I pick the appropriate action type and then click Continue. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

Enabling Action Types for a Transaction In the Use Existing Action Types: Review screen, review any listed attributes And click the Finish button. I just check to review any existing attributes and then Finish. Attributes are pieces of information that are available in the transaction that you may want to use as conditions in a rule. So for example an attribute for a journal might be the journal source or the journal category or the journal amount. Most of the attributes you would want to use for a given transaction type like journal approval have already been created by development. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

Create An Approver Group In the Approvals Management Business Analyst Dashboard, choose a Transaction Type and click the Approver Groups link. For my rule I want to specify that journals with a certain category must be approved by members of an approver group that I create. So, first I’ll need to create the approver group. Note that prior to AME, journals were just routed based on the employee-supervisor hierarchy which was extremely limiting, and the only criteria on which journals could be routed for approval was the dollar amount. So without AME you could not route a journal with a specific category to a specific group of people, you could only route it to the supervisor of the journal creator based on a dollar amount set for each employee. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

Create An Approver Group In the Approver Groups screen, click the Create button. In the Approver group screen, I can search for an existing approver group or create a new one. It is important to consider who the administrator is for AME, because if you have two transaction types that can use the same group of approvers, you don’t need to create the approver group twice. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

Create An Approver Group In the Approver group screen, give the approver group a name and a description and specify a Voting Method. There are two kinds of approver groups – Static and Dynamic. Static approver groups require that you select group members by name (a maintenance issue if you have high turnover) whereas dynamic approver groups let you write a SQL fragment (like find all users with the same cost center for example). The voting method allows you to specify that if there are multiple members in a group that the first responder can respond on behalf of everyone in the group, or that every member in the group must respond. To make life simple, I’ll create a Static Approver group with a voting method of First Responder Wins. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

Create An Approver Group For a static approver group you can choose Group members by name. Then click the apply button in the Approver Group screen. So, my approver group consists of Terry Green and Jamie Frost., and I gave the approver group a logical name so someone else might be able to use it as well. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite Create A Rule Click on the Rules tab. In the Rules screen, click the Create button. A rule is going to consist of Conditions and Actions. The condition would be if the Journal Category is Adjustment. The Action would be to require approval from the approver group. So to create a rule for the Journal approval transaction type, I go to the rule screen and click the Create button. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite Create A Rule In the Create New Rule: Enter Rule Details screen, give your rule a name and click The Next button. I give the rule a meaningful name and a start date (I would not enter an end date because you may not be able to remove it or change it.) An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

Create A Rule: Create Conditions In the Create New Rule: Add Conditions screen, click the Add Condition button, NOTE: Conditions are re-useable so you may want to search first to see if the Condition already exists. Next I have to create a condition. Conditions, like approver groups are reusable, so you want to be careful about the naming convention that you use here because someone else may want to use the condition and sometimes you cannot re-create a condition that is looking at the same attribute as another condition. You might want to search to see if the condition already exists, but mine does not. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

Create A Rule: Create Conditions In the Create New Rule: Add Conditions screen, click the Add Condition button, In the Create New Rule: Add Conditions screen, I can click the Add Condition button. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

Create A Rule: Create Conditions In the Add Conditions screen, click the Create button. In the Add Conditions screen, I click the Create button so I can specify the attributes and values that will make up my condition. I can have a simple condition, where I’m looking at only one piece of information, like the journal category, or I could have a complex condition where I’m looking at a combination of attributes like the journal category and the amount and maybe the journal creator or the currency. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

Create A Rule: Create Conditions In the Create New Condition screen, click on the list of values for the Attribute field.. In the Create New Condition screen, I have to pick an attribute whose value I wish to evaluate. Again, most of the attributes you would ever want to use in a condition in your rules have already been defined by development. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

Create A Rule: Create Conditions Choose an Attribute and click the Select button. For General Ledger Journal approval the available attributes consist of things like the journal source, the journal category, but also every single Descriptive flexfield segment on the batch or the header or the line, so there are lots of options. For my simple rule, I’ll just choose the Journal Category for my condition.. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

Create A Rule: Create Conditions In the Create New Condition screen, enter a value for the Attribute and click the Apply button. In the Create new condition screen, you can pick the attribute and then enter a value for the attribute. NOTE THAT THE VALUE is CASE-SENSITIVE and AME does not validate that you entered a value for the attribute. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

Create A Rule: Select Conditions Once you see the Confirmation message, make sure your condition is selected and Click the Continue button to continue creating the rule. Once you’ve created the condition you must select it to use it in your rule. You can also selecting existing conditions. You can also combine conditions together for a given rule, like Journal category and journal amount. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

Create A Rule: Select Conditions In the Create New Rule: Add Conditions screen, verify that you see your condition And click the Next button. Once you’ve selected your condition, verify that you have chosen the correct condition and then you can specify the actions to take if the conditions are met. NOTE: There can be multiple rules for a given transaction type and if a particular transaction meets the conditions of more than one rule then the actions associated with all of the rules whose conditions are met must be executed. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

Create A Rule: Specify Actions In the Create New Rule: Add Actions screen, choose an Action Type and choose the appropriate action (in this example the only action type is the one that we made available for this transaction type.) Click the Next button. In the Create New Rule: Add Actions screen, you can add any actions that have been enabled for the AME transaction type. In our example it’s only the one action, but in other transaction types you have actions like require approval up to the X superior level, or require approval up to the X job level and so on. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite Create A Rule: Review In the Create New Rule: Review screen, review the Condition(s) and Action(s) for for your rule and click the Finish button. Once you’ve chosen the condition and chosen the appropriate action for that condition you can review the components of the rule – the condition or conditions and the action or actions required when the condition or conditions are met. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

Create A Rule: Confirmation Verify that you receive confirmation that your rule has been create successfully. Then click on the Test Workbench tab. Verify that your rule has been successfully created and then we will be able to go test the rule in the Test Workbench. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite Test Workbench In the Test Workbench screen, click the Create button to create a new test case. One of the best things about AME is that you don’t have to “waste” an actual transaction to test your rule – you can build a test case and run it from the AME Business Analyst Dashboard. So I go to the test workbench tab for my transaction type and I can create a test case that meets the conditions of my rule to see if the test case would require the actions associated with my rule. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite Test Workbench In the Create Test Case screen, give your rule a name and a description. In the Test case screen, I can give my test case a meaningful name and a description. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite Test Workbench Scroll down until you find the attribute which you used in your rule condition and and enter the value for the attribute that you used in your condition. Then click the Save for Later button. Then in the test case definition, I can enter a value for the attribute that the condition in my rule is evaluating, which is the journal category. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite Test Workbench From the Test Workbench screen, choose your test case and click the Run button. Then I save the test case so that I can use it again, and then I can actually Run the test case without ever entering an actual transaction. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite Test Workbench In the Run Test Case screen you can see that for the test case the conditions of your rule evaluated to True, and so the action associated with your rule was used to generate the Final Processed Approver list. Click on the View Approval Process Stages button. In the Test screen I can see that the conditions of my rule evaluated to true so the action associated with my rule would be taken, which would be to require approval from all of the members of my approver group which consisted of Terry Green and Jamie Frost. I can click on the View Approval Process stages button to see how the engine evaluated the rule. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite Test Workbench In the View Approval Process Stages screen you can see that your rule was evaluated (If there had been multiple rules they would have executed in order by priority). I can see that my rule was evaluated and its conditions were determined to be true. Remember that I said that if there are multiple rules for the same transaction type but different conditions, that the rule will be evaluated in order and any rule whose conditions are met, its actions will need to be taken. So if there had been another rule which looked for journals with an amount over 1000.00 for example, and an action requiring approval from the journal creator’s supervisor, and my test case was journal category Adjustment and the amount was 1200.00 then the test case would meet the condition of both rules and approval would be required from the journal creator’s supervisor as well as Terry Green and Jamie Frost. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite Test Workbench In the View Approval Process Stages screen you can view the Default approver list and the approver list after suppressing repeated approvers. So for example, if your rule had had two actions – Require Approval from Approver Group and Require Approval from Supervisor, and the supervisor was in the approver group, you would not want the supervisor to receive two separate notifications. You can also view the list after repeat approvers are suppressed. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

Test Workbench – Run a Real Transaction test To run a real transaction test, you need the transaction id. For A GL Journal, That is the batch ID. So, I can create a journal entry and then click on Help/Diagnostics/Examine to find the value for the JE_BATCH_ID. The test workbench also lets you run a real transaction test, without actually processing a real transaction. So for this example, I went and created a journal entry in the GL journal interface and then I clicked on Help/Diagnostics/Examine to find the JE_BATCH_ID which would be the relevant transaction ID for the journal approval transaction type because journals are approved by batch, not by individual entry (something to think about when deciding whether or not to use batching in GL or not!) An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

Test Workbench – Run a Real Transaction test In the Test Workbench screen, you can click the button to Run Real Transaction Test(). If I go back to the Test Workbench screen, I can click the button to run a Real Transaction test. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

Test Workbench – Run a Real Transaction test Enter the Transaction ID and click the Go button and the test workbench will retrieve all of the attributes from the transaction. I can enter the transaction ID and Approvals Management Engine will retrieve the appropriate values for all of the transaction Attributes using the transaction ID. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

Test Workbench – Run a Real Transaction test You can view the Header Attributes (From the GL_JE_HEADERS table). This screen shows attributes from the header – note that you see all of the DFF Segments.. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

Test Workbench – Run a Real Transaction test You can view the Line Attributes (also from the GL_JE_HEADERS Table). This screen shows attributes from the header, including all of the DFF Segments. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

Test Workbench – Run a Real Transaction test You can view the Line Attributes (also from the GL_JE_HEADERS Table). More attributes and DFF Segments An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

Test Workbench – Run a Real Transaction test You can view the Distribution Attributes (from the GL_JE_LINES Table). More attributes including DFF’s. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

Test Workbench – Run a Real Transaction test Click the Run Test Case (2) button And again, click the Run button for the second test case, which was created from the Transaction ID. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

Test Workbench – Run a Real Transaction test If your transaction does not meet the rule conditions then you’ll get an error If for any reason there is a problem with the test case you will get an error. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

Test Workbench – Run a Real Transaction test I modified the rule by removing the original condition, and then creating and using a new condition. Just for kicks, I had created a bad condition where the journal category was equal to adjustment rather than Adjustment with a capital A, so I went back and deleted that original condition, created a new one with the correct value for the Category attribute, and then modified my rule to use the new condition. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

Test Workbench – Run a Real Transaction test …and now when I run a real transaction test it produces the same results as my test case. And Now when I run the real transaction test I get the same result I did with my test case. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

Enable AME Journal approval for the GL application. To enable AME journal approval for the GL application as opposed to Standard Journal Approval, you must set the profile option. In order to enable AME transaction approval for a given application, you have to know how AME transaction approval is enabled for that specific application, and it is different for each application. For General Ledger, there is a profile option you must set called GL: Use approval management. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

Enable AME Journal approval for the GL application. Journal Approval still must be enabled at the Ledger level. For General Ledger journal approval you must still enable the use of journal approval at the ledger level, but you require it for specific journal sources. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

Enable AME Journal approval for the GL application. Journal Approval still must be set to required by journal source. At the source level, you can specify what journal sources require approval. Normally journal approval would only be enabled for journal sources like Manual or Spreadsheet since journals from other sources are normally created as the result of a transaction that itself has an approval process (for example, AP invoices have a matching process, so they often do not require an approval process involving human intervention) An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

Enable AP invoice approval in the AP application. Invoice approval is setup in the AP application in Payables Options. For Payables, AP invoice approval is enabled in the Payables Options screen. Every module is different. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

Some additional resources This presentation will cover (using GL Journal approval as an example): Oracle General Ledger Journal Approvals Integration with Oracle Approvals Management and Oracle Workflow (Doc ID 2038960.1) Oracle University’s self-study course on AME Oracle University’s Workflow class Oracle University’s application-specific classes for modules that use AME: -Oracle Self-Service Human Resources Here are a number of additional resources plus I believe that you can find some excellent blogs on Approvals Management Engine as well – some of the blogs are oriented towards more technical users attempting to use AME for a module where currently no existing transaction types exist. The Oracle University self-study AME course is geared more towards creation of new transaction types and attributes, etc. An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite

An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite Summary In this presentation, you should have learned how to…… Giving your user access to the Approvals Management Engine dashboard Enabling action types for the GL Journal approval transaction type Creating an approver group Creating a rule with conditions and actions Creating and running a test case in Approvals Management Engine Running a Real Transaction test in Approvals Management Engine Additional resources that you may find useful An Overview of Approvals Management Engine in Ebusiness Suite