One of the very first questions during an EBS audit is: Can you show us your user creation process and how do you register approvals for that. My experience so far is that it’s really time-consuming to convince the auditors that you have a good process for this and that the approvals are under control.
How much time would it save if we create a User Management role and be able to use an AME workflow to approve the role for assignment? It would give you a great tool to prove to auditors that you are in control of your new user/role assignments. It would be a huge time saver for your support organization and it gives great visibility of the approvals for the new user or role.
Obviously, Oracle has thought about this. Hereby a description how to configure Oracle EBS in such a way that the two are connected.
Step 1 – Create custom AME workflow type
First, we’ve to create a custom workflow type in AME. Therefore we need the responsibility Approvals Management Administrator.
Click the Create Transaction Type button.
Enter the application, workflow type key and transaction type name and click continue.
In the second step (Item Classes) accept all the defaults and click continue. The third step is Mandatory Attributes. Enter here the values as you want for the workflow. I advise setting the option use workflow to True, so you can see the approval workflow in the workflow manager.
In that case, you should also enter the workflow item key and workflow item Type. Especially the workflow item key is key in this. Here you must make sure a unique key is generated for every new request. Most difficult in this is to find the transactionIdvalue (AME default). For the registration processes in User Management, this is the REG_REQUEST_ID of the table UMX_REG_REQUESTS. I use this ID as workflow item key.
I’ve applied the value False to the AT_LEAST_ONE_RULE_MUST_APPLY option. This to give me the possibility to have roles automatically approved.
Click next to go to the review page and click Finish to complete the setup.
Step 2 – Create role in User Management
In user management create a role with all the correct additional roles, responsibilities and grants. The configuration of User Management is not part of this How-to guide.
Step 3 – Create registration process
Go the Registration Processes function in the User management responsibility. Click on the Create Registration Processes button.
Enter the role or responsibility you want the approval for. Select the type of workflow. Here are four options. The first two for additional access, where you can choose between Self Service or Administrator. These are for additional roles. The last two options are for Account creation. We could use the approval workflow here as well, but for this guide, we choose the type Additional access (Administrator).
Click Next. We now come on the page where the magic happens. Select the notification type in the required field.
IMPORTANT: select the previously created transaction type in Approval transaction type field
Click Submit to complete the setup.
Step 4 – Create approval logic
In the responsibility Approvals Management Business Analyst now you can create the approval logic. Be aware to make the logic created is dynamic and not specific for the role created in the previous step. You can achieve this, for example, by using a lookup type for all your registration process and the approvers in the descriptive flexfields.
Step 5 – Test your results
When the approval logic is configured. Test your solution and make sure the correct approver(s) is/are selected.
Conclusion
With this configuration in place, you can give the auditors the functional design (or even this post) of your approval configuration and show them the approvals are under control. When applied on the account creation process, this is under control as well. I’m convinced that the auditors would be very happy and within 5 minutes this subject is off the table.
If you have any questions about User Management or Approvals Management, feel free to contact us here or on LinkedIn.
