Approval Management Options for AP and OIE

Oracle Internet Expenses (OIE) has traditionally integrated with HR for the approval hierarchy creation along with seeded workflow APEXP. Expense report submitted by an Employee would require approver from Employee's Supervisor who has been setup with required approval signing limit, if the immediate Supervisor does not have enough signing limit the workflow would pass the document to the next Supervisor. This process of finding the approver with required signing limit using the Employee HR Hierarchy has been the core of the logic embedded in the APEXP Workflow.
Customer's Implementing OIE had to customize the APEXP Workflow if their requirements around Expense report approval were different than the seeded workflow.

Oracle Payables up to the release of 11.5.10 did not have the functionality of Invoice approval seeded, clients that needed an approval process on Invoices had to use custom approach or use an offline approach.
Payables was enhanced to provide the Invoice approval functionality by means of an integrated Invoice Approval Workflow and use of OAM (Oracle Approvals Management) for deriving the approvers list.
This enhancement was available to the existing clients who were already on 11.5.10 by means of certain patch sets.

OAM has since undergone a name change and is now more familiar as AME (Approval Management Engine). AME is a rules engine that can provide a list of approvers to the calling application. Customer's can configure AME for a particular business transaction by use of simple static or dynamic values base on sql statements for generating an approver list.

AME has been integrated with Payables for the Invoice approval at the same time it also integrates with OIE (Oracle Internet Expenses). OIE approvals can now happen either by use of the old and traditional HR Hierarchy logic embedded with in the APEXP workflow or use AME and generate an approver list as per the business needs. Customer's who needed the Expense report to follow a different path of approval than the traditional HR hierarchy need not have to open up the APEXP workflow and customize rather they could use AME.

AME for Payables Invoice approval is the only option.

Having provided the introduction or overview of the approval process in AP and OIE, I would like to present a real time situation.

I had the opportunity to work on a project where the customer was implementing Oracle EBS R12; they were going to use Payables and OIE. We first started addressing the payables invoice approval requirement, I configured AME for use with payables and the solution was finalized. Internet Expenses requirement for the customer were reviewed and they were not complex, the approval process was the Employee HR Hierarchy and we knew the standard Internet Expense flow would fit the needs.

As we started testing Internet Expenses none of the expense report would be routed to the Employee's supervisor rather they would become eligible for Payables approval. We were surprised, why would the traditional HR hierarchy not be used for approval?

Little digging thru....the solution or issue was addressed.

Oracle AME can be turned on or off  at an application level, as I mentioned earlier Payables Invoices have to go thru AME where as Internet Expenses can go thru HR(Traditional approach) or AME.
Payables (SQLAP) is the application that owns both the Payables Invoice Approval and Expense report functionality, even though OIE (Internet Expenses) is considered an application by itself it really is considered part of the Payables application.

That was the issue, we intended to use AME for AP but for OIE we did not need AME and were happy with the seeded HR Approach, but since we turned on AME for Payables application OIE would not use the HR approach.

This setup for AME is controlled by the Profile ‘AME:Installed’, to enable approval for Payables set this profile value to  ‘Yes’. This essentially means you would want to use AME for Payables application and that means both Invoice approval and Expense report approval.

I would think it would have been more appropriate to have the option for the customer to choose AME at a Transaction type within an application. I should have had an option to say AP INVOICE  - AME  Y and AP EXPENSE REPORT - AME N.

Well that was the issue, and here is the solution.

Having decided to use AME for Invoice approval but for OIE we had to take the traditional HR approach.
We let the profile for AME turned on for Payables, which makes both Invoice and Expense report to follow AME as per setup. Expense report workflow was tweaked to ignore the AME profile setup and assume that AME is not installed thus passing the Expense report to take the HR hierarchy. Key is to change the functionality of AME Enabled process in the APEXP Workflow.

If AME is enabled the process takes a different route

We need to make it believe that AME is not enabled.

That will take the traditional route as below, this was the desired approach.

This approach worked for the customer requirement of using AME for Invoice approval and ignore AME for Expense reports.

Applied this approach on couple of implementations to workaround the issue of  having one profile option for both Business transaction types.

Hope this helps for some one dealing with a similar situation!