Oracle Human Capital Management (or HCM) is a tool that helps individuals and organizations streamline their human capital operations, improving organizational efficiency and reducing the likelihood of unwanted and costly errors.

Neelakanta Reddy, a senior principal software engineer with more than 10 years of Oracle Fusion HCM Cloud experience, offered some key insight in the webinar, Oracle HCM Cloud: Workflows and Approvals.

Approval Management Overview

HCM Approval Management allows organizations to control and streamline business process workflows, ranging from the simple to the complex. Using a pre-determined sequence, tasks automatically move between users for approval and completion.

A wide range of tasks can be incorporated under the HCM umbrella, including hiring, transferring, promoting, and terminating employees, using a fully-integrated process including:

1. Oracle Business Process Management (BPM) – Allows users to access assigned tasks.
2. Oracle SOA approvals – spell out complex rules).
3. Oracle Human Capital Management.

What are approval rules?

Approval rules are the instructions that allow us to move forward with transactions. In simple terms, approval rules are If/Then statements. The “if” portion is focused on when something happens. The “then” portion focuses on what happens when conditions are met and who can approve them.

There are multiple approval rules possible for any transaction. If multiple approval rules exist, they are processed and approved in an undefined order.

In general, there are two ways to manage approval policies:

1. Managing approval transactions for human capital management.
2. Supervising human capital management task configuration via the BPM Worklist.

An if-then example

There are numerous examples of if-then situations that you will encounter at work. Consider the following case. You need to determine if someone works in a particular department and what their job is. This is the “if” piece of the equation. If the ifs are satisfied, you can move on to taking action on the “then” part of the equation, such as a promotion.

Sometimes, the “then” portion requires authorized individuals to complete an approval. In other cases, approval is not required — instead, people are simply informed about what is happening, an FYI only. And, in other situations, the system may be set up to generate automatic approvals. Different approval processes may be better suited to different situations.

A plethora of approver choices

Depending on your organization’s HR needs, there are various ways to assign approval rights. Multiple types of approvers are possible, and they can be linked via different hierarchies.

Below are some of the most common approval structures:

1. Management hierarchy: This requires knowing who reports to whom.
2. Job-level based line manager hierarchy: This is similar to a management hierarchy, but people need to meet a certain job level cut-off to be an approver in this hierarchy.
3. Position hierarchy: Uses a corporate tree and moves from decision node to node within the tree.
4. Users: This includes all designated HCM cloud users.
5. Representatives: This approach brings in designated people from various departments, such as HR and payroll.
6. Application approach: Approvers are selected based on their duty roles.

Organizations should carefully evaluate the tasks that they are looking to complete and select the approval process that is most effective in this area. Organizations should also consider if they want to approve individual users or if they want to set up approval groups for a set of users.

What is a transaction console? And why is it important?

A good way to think about a transaction console is as a snapshot that lets us see where everything stands in the approval process. The console sets up approval rules, as well as workarounds for these rules in specific situations. It allows you to see what has worked in the past and what hasn’t worked and make real time adjustments. You can also use the console to search for results and export your results to a spreadsheet.

Demonstrating the transaction console provides even more detail

A detailed product demo of the transaction console gives an even more detailed picture of how this tool can be helpful for your organization.

After clicking on your tools button, you will be taken to your transaction console that will show a detailed list of your transaction summaries.

These transactions can be searched in numerous ways, including by task, date, and priority level. In addition to showing the transaction summaries, this console also illustrates analytics and approval rules, such as: bypassing rules, configuring rules, and testing rules.

Let’s look at how to configure rules if our task is to promote an employee. Your console will show you the if-then statements, as well as all of the approvers. Equipped with this information, you can then select the person you want to promote based on his/her attributes. You can then select what approvers are relevant for this situation, and, if needed, set up the specific approval process.

Within the transaction console, you also have access to an approval simulator that lets you test rules. This is an incremental and user-friendly way to see how rule changes potentially impact users. It also lets you see what tangible steps help move a failed transaction to a successful one.

The Oracle BPM Worklist

The Worklist is an effective interface allowing users to access and then perform a variety of tasks. The Worklist and its functionality can be adapted to match a user’s profile.

The Worklist is composed of four primary pages:

1. Home page, showing basic information about the task;
2. Administration page, detailing how to configure tasks and create users;
3. Reports page, providing a variety of details about the tasks;
4. Preferences page, allowing you to set user rules on things like vacations, such as who will be delegated a task if you are out of the office.

The Worklist has the added bonus of allowing you to set tasks as parallel or sequential, depending on your specific needs. It also gives you control over the notification process, minimizing the risk of something slipping through the cracks. However, if you feel overwhelmed by notifications, you can also aggregate them to minimize the number of notifications.

Exporting and importing approval rules

Rules can be moved from one environment to another using the SOA Composer. The only catch is that you have to be at the same patch level and release version for this movement to work.

Key takeaways

Oracle HCM Cloud allows organizations to streamline how their human capital processes work. In a fully integrated manner, HCM Cloud moves tasks, such as hiring, promoting, and terminating, from the beginning stage to successful completion, allowing a wide range of users to approve it.

To learn more about how to successfully navigate the Oracle HCM Cloud, watch the original webinar, Oracle HCM Cloud: Workflows and Approvals.