We have a situation where the client wants to require two people to approve POs over a certain dollar amount. This is an AND situation, not an OR. Both need to approve, not one or the other. Since the APPROVAL PERSON field only offers one option, are there any ways to accomplish this? Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
Thereās probably a better solution, but you could add a UD Field for the second approver - and a pre-processing BPM to enforce having a second approver when the $ condition is metā¦ Can you copy the original approver field/process onto the second one?
I think the PO Approval is more of an escalation concept out of the box. It doesnāt seem like it would take much work to just add a secondary approver to the PO though.
I suspect where it gets complicated is that you donāt ALWAYS need two approvers, and then the conditional Approval could make this more complicated. You might need to add an intermediate step for Approval Type or something like that to make this easier to manage.
What I have done in the past is to move the PO Approval to the Requisition. That allows for multiple approvers but is a manual process. Not ideal, but it does work.
This approach requires a well defined approval process that employees can use to reference as it puts the onus on the people in the requisition process to forward to the next approver. You can have the Buyer enter the requisition and they kick off the approval of it. Once it is fully approved, it can come into PO Suggestions fully approved and the Buyer can just generate the PO and send it out.
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Iām thinking Iāll use the requisition process where one of the two (and we would define which of the two) would approve the requisition (that user would not have ārightsā to approve the PO, only the Requisition. The other would approve the PO.
Thanks for the suggestions.
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Wow! I like that solution too. Never thought of that. Thanks for sharing your plan!
BTW, this is the built-in requisition system. I have seen demos of Epicorās Advanced Requestion solution (ARM) that you may want to look into as well. As I recall, it has a quite complete approval system as well as a nice tie-in to available budgets. Itās certainly worth a look if you need that type of capability.
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Is that the QBuild (CADLink) one or something newer?
ARM: Advance Requisition Management. Itās sold by Precise, the same people that do Advance Project Management. Theyāre pretty tight with Epicor. This is not a sales pitch, just wanted to let others know that itās out there.
Thanks for the mention @Mark_Wonsil.
ARM allows you to build out approval ātreesā using different data dimensions to branch approvals, where at each approval ānodeā you define who does the approving. Specifically addressing your challenge @kforan Ken, this can be one person or multiple; if it is multiple approvers on a given node, you can further say whether one or all have to approve the req line before it moves onto the next approval node (or is fully approved). Thereās all sorts of configurable notifications around that as well.
Once a req (ARM actually approves right to the line level but for simplicity letās just talk the req itself) is approved, there is a further configurable step to convert it from what we term the āpro forma orderā. That could be a further intervention in your case if you like, where there is still an āultimateā approver, perhaps the procurement manager or whatever, to generate the PO itself. Alternatively, that step can be fully-automated and you can determine if the PO should be created āapprovedā in Kinetic or still use the standard buyer approval mechanism there. Let me know if youād like to discuss more, or reach out to your Epicor CAM (as Mark inferred, we are a Platinum ISV with them).
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