Process Automation — Extending the standard approval process of Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications
In the ever-evolving digital transformation of business operations, the demand for dynamic solutions like Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications and Oracle Process Automation is surging. If you’ve ever grappled with the complexities of integrating external approvers, tailoring dynamic hierarchies, or dreamt of simplifying those overwhelming approval email barrages, then you’re in the right place. Today, we’re diving deep into the intricacies of Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) and Fusion Workflow to offer you a guide that’s bound to revolutionize your operational efficiencies. Let’s unlock the power of Oracle Process Cloud together.
Oracle is putting all efforts to meet the customers diverse expectations. However, one size doesn’t fit all, as every customer has their own business needs. There are several reasons why people might want to customize or extend SaaS applications:
Meet specific business needs
Improve the user experience
Integrate with other systems
Improve security
Add new functionality
Especially in this multi-cloud environment, choosing “best of breed” SaaS applications from multiple cloud vendors, customize, extend and integrating them has become more crucial in the present time.
Customizing and extended the standard approval process is one of these multiple organization needs. We can use BPM worklist to modify or add business approval rules and configure approval groups & notifications, but these customizations are limited.
Use cases:
Need to take approval from an external approver whose account cannot be setup in Oracle Fusion Cloud.
Need a dynamic approver hierarchy based on the external data, which is not available in standard BPM task’s payload to configure the business rules.
Display additional information and editable fields in approval form or email notifications, either from the external system or from another module of Fusion (data not available in standard task’s payload).
Approvers don’t want to receive hundreds of emails to approve/reject for each individual task but want to mass action them all in a single task/form.
Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) offers Process Automation capabilities (OIC Enterprise Edition) that help business and IT groups within enterprises to implement business process initiatives that aim at automating business transactions and complex BPM capabilities that usually involve people and systems of record.
There are two working environments:
The design-time environment:
Provides business-friendly graphical tools for designing processes, forms, data, decision models, and metrics from scratch.
Provides test environments for refining processes before activating them for use in production.
The runtime environment:
Makes it easy for you to view, complete, reassign, and delegate tasks. Lets you stay organized with filters.
Provides tools to track process flows, view detailed audit trails, troubleshoot, and fix processes.
Following is the High level design for extending the standard approval processes of Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications, like Invoices, Projects, Budgets, Purchase Orders, and Expenses approvals.
Standard approval process needs to be customized to send the notification to the specific assignee (service user setup in Fusion), your scheduled integration will keep polling the tasks assigned to this service user to read the payload and start creating the custom process instances in OIC. Your custom process application can accept the payload with all the information it needed to display to the approver, either in the web form (My Tasks) or in the email notifications. (sample screenshots given below). On final approval (based on Single, Sequence or Parallel), you need to mark the standard task as completed with right outcome (approved or rejected), so the standard process will resume with the rest of the standard business logic.
Below screenshot on how to customize the standard approval process and send it to the specific service user by hardcoding the user details, so we poll all the tasks assigned to this user from the OIC scheduled integration and extend & automate this process in Oracle Process Cloud Service (OIC).
Following is the screenshot of custom web form in Process Application, for approver to take mass action and submit all at once. I have provided the link in reference section on how to create the web forms.
Approvers would like to see the glimpse of all the relevant information before they approve or reject, and attachments are one of many must have for them to review before actioning. Below is the same actionable email notifications with deep links to Fusion application project’s page, Custom VBCS page for attachments and direct access to BI Publisher reports for any information that needs to be displayed from Oracle Fusion tables.
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