3. Business Rules and Approval Routing

PECOS P2P will be customised for your company so that the approval process follows your business rules. These business rules are defined within the system in Approval Plans (or 'Workflows') that are assigned to users or organisations.

• PECOS P2P will automatically route Requisitions, Order Requests, Change Orders and Invoices to the individuals your organisation specifies.
• Routing can be based on individual or multiple criteria and includes (but is not limited to):
  • Requisition, order or invoice values.
  • Supplier details or type.
  • Financial tracking code (e.g. a cost centre).
  • Business organisational unit (e.g. a department).
  • Product classification code (e.g. UNSPSC Code).
  • Document type.
  • Budget criteria.
  • Buy-for user rights.
• The amount or percentage variance from the original order or previous change order can be set to trigger Change Order approval.
• Approval routing can be defined for both individuals or for approval roles.
• Approval may be performed by either single or multiple approvers.
• The system can put limitations on what can be purchased and by whom, in your organisation.
• Approvers can be given different editing capabilities.
• Approvers have the ability to delegate an alternate approver for a defined time period, in order to accommodate periods of temporary absence.
• Notification emails can be sent to both Requisitioner and Approver throughout the approval process.
• Audit Trails continually update to include all approval actions.
• Your system administrator has control of the permissions assigned to each person.

Approval Ownership - Roles

The owner of an approval task can either be a named user within PECOS P2P or a defined role. Both users and roles can be used within an approval plan but only one type of approver is assigned to any task (i.e. a user or a role).

Some examples of approver roles are:

• Departmental Manager
• Cost Centre Manager
• Finance Manager
• Budget Holder
• Technical Approver
• Director of I.T.

Alternatively, roles may be generic:

• Approver 1
• Approver 2
• Approver 3 etc.

If roles are used within an approval plan, PECOS P2P users (i.e. the approvers) are assigned to these roles within a requisitioner’s Approval Rule Group (ARG). This ensures that documents are routed to the correct role owner.

In the event of a routing failure (the reason might be that your system administrator has forgotten to assign an approver to a role that is used in an approval plan) your administrator will receive an error message.

The advantages of using role based approval routing include:

• There is less administration required to approval plans when individuals leave your organisation. People change but roles do not.
• The same role can be used across several different Approval Plans and assigned to different people within Approval Rule Groups. For example the role of ‘Department Manager’ is often generic across an organisation and can be filled by many different individuals.
• Roles allow for multiple approvers to be assigned to a single approval task. For example there might be four people filling the role of ‘Technical Approver’. One or all of these people can be required to undertake approval.

Types of Document
The Role of an Approver
Approval Options
Editing Options
Escalation
Notification Messages
Approval Stages
Delegating Approval
Approval Reassignment
Budget Checking
Price Quotation