Multiple PO approvers per buyer

Epicor ERP 10
1

Is there a way to allow different people to do PO approvals? The Buyer Maintenance screen only allows one approval person per buyer.

We have 2 buyers, and before they place a PO they need the authorization of the specific Project manager designated to the sales order.

There are about 15 Proj Managers. Not overly concerned with PM “A” accidentally approving a PO for one of PM “B’s” projects.

2

You can do that by making people authorized users of other buyers. So, if PM A has PM B as an authorized user, both A & B can approve whoever has A as the approval person.

3

I’m referring to the PO approval process, where the buyer can’t approve PO’s over a certain amount. Those PO’s require the Authorized person to use the “PO Approval” system.

Edit: And we don’t want the PM’s to have the ability to create PO’s

4

Yes, what I said still works. Each approver is a buyer themselves.

5

But we don’t want the PM’s to be able to edit PO’s.

Plus, if a PO limit is set for a buyer, wouldn’t that apply to all users acting as that buyer?

6

If you are using out of the box functionality, in order to make someone a PO Approver they need to be set up as a buyer. Definitely not ideal, but that’s all we got.

You could use Purchasing Reqs for the approvals. That way you get the approvals you need without opening up PO access.

Epicor does not do Purchasing well. In my opinion, they should really be trying to improve the functionality.

7

Could you setup a security group for the buyers and deny PO entry to everyone else?

8

gpayne - I guess so.

But one test (which might not be adequate) showed that if a user is an authorized user for a buy AND the approver for the buyer, the Approver can’t approve, because they are a member of the buyer that is restricted.

This test is hard to do BECAUSE IT AINT EASY TO LOGIN AS ANOTHER USER !!!

But even if I create a bunch of Buyer records for the PM’s, and used security to prevent them from doing PO’s, I couldn’t assign more than one PM (as an approver) to the “purcahsing” buyers.

I could make one “approving” buyer, with all the PM’s as authorized users, and then make that the lone Approval Person for each the purcahsing buyers.

9

how about setting up the APPROVERS with an updateable dashboard to allow them to SET the approval flag on a PO

and then - setup as authorized users for the BUYERS or unique APPROVERS

with that - they need to be excluded from PO ENTRY (if that is possible) menu maint
and if NOT then setup in a SECURITY GROUP with a BPM that disallows PO ENTRY creation for that SG

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10

In my opinion, Requisitions could possibly be a better fit.
The requestor would enter a Requisition, dispatch the requisition to the appropriate PM, who would then approve the request and it would then show up to the requisition line’s part class buyer’s PO Suggestions.

11

I normally setup a dummy environment and alter the users details to login as them to test this sort of thing.

You should be able to get this to work with BPMs. You should be able to use PO.Update and POApvMsg.Update to send emails and alter the behavior. From what I am understanding, you can have more than one PM an approver for a buyer and its first in best dressed to whoever approves. We have a similar thing for quotes, but we use BAMs which I will be converting to BPMs at some stage.

Cheers
Simon

12

Thanks all -

But our goal is a little different than I originally stated. The PM’s don’t approve the PO’s, their boss (a RM) does.

Here’s what we currently do (without any system based approval process)

  • PM’s design the solution for the customer (specifying the line items that end up on the SO)
  • Order Entry creates the Quote & SO
  • Purchasing enters a PO for non-inventory items (Buy To Order, or Buy To Job) for that SO
  • If the PO does not exceed the buyers limit, the buyer self approves it and processes the PO

Here’s what we’d like to happen when the PO exceeds the buyers limit:

  • The buyer is unable to mark it as ‘Approved’, which prevents further processing.
  • A notice is sent to the Regional Manager (RM, the PM’s boss), that a PO is pending their approval.
  • The RM uses PO Approval screen to see unapproved PO’s and may approve them.
  • Upon approval, the buyer gets an email stating the PO has been approved.
  • The buyer then completes the PO process (printing, marking confirmed, etc…)

The problem is there are many PM’s and several RM’s. Ideally:

  • Only the RM (the boss of the PM this order is for) gets the message that approval is required.
  • This RM only sees Unapproved PO’s that are for their PM’s PO’s
  • In addition to the RM being able to approve a PO, there are two others (The President, and VP of Operations) that can approve any PO.

It looks like E10’s limit of a single approver per buyer, will pretty much kill using the built in PO Approval system.

So BPM’s and updatable dashboards may be in order.

And of course the PM’s RM’s and President don’t currently use E10. So anything they need to do needs to be streamlined as simple as possible.

13

Calvin,
A few idea’s popped into my head, none tested:
1. Move up the RM approval to the Quote or Sales Order: If you move it up to the Quote you can have a series of tasks associated with the Quote, such as:

  1. Enter Quote
  2. PM Quote Approval (make sure it was entered right)
  3. RM Quote Approval (make sure it’s not crazy)
  4. Convert to Order
    With this you can have a BPM on Tasks that auto emails the person assigned to the task with some of the quote information.
    Then if you have Service Connect you could get fancy and have the email reply (to epicor@yourcompany.com) which SC checks, parses for certain approval terms, and then updates the task with the email response in the task comments and sets the appropriate task reason. (yes or no).

2. Hand it over to Service Connect to handle: Use PO Approvals but have a single buyer called ‘RM’ or something with your Service Connect User as an authorized user. This assumes the PO is linked to the SO or Job and the Job is linked to the SO:

  1. BPM when PO approval required from the ‘RM’ buyer, traces one of the PO lines to it’s source (SO or Job(then Job back to SO)), evaluates SO’s Territory or Salespersons for the appropriate RM and sends an email to the RM that the PO needs approved.
  2. RM just replies to the PO with either Approved or Denied or other keywords (A vs D) and some comments. The reply goes to epicor@yourcompany.com.
  3. Service Connect picks up the email parses and then approves the PO with the email header & message in the comments (proof of who approved)
  4. BPM on POAprMsg table to email the Buyer that it is now approved.

Don’t know if that really helps, but just a few thoughts that I thought I would share.

-Rick
getaligned.solutions

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14

I talked with these guys at Insights, as we are looking for a better PO/Req management process as well. The package looked pretty good but I haven’t had time to go any further with it. The nice thing about this is that it eliminates the issue of upper management never using Epicor, because the approvals are web/email.

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15

I talked with these guys at Insights too and their solution is pretty slick.

Separately at Insights, I heard the Custom Solutions Group had some kind of requisition system for projects that looked very promising. Multiple approvers, email approvals, etc. Might be worth looking into as well.

Mark W.

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16

Before it was called ARM it was known a eReq. (about 8 years ago at least). This product has got pretty good now and Mark Batina and his team know their stuff when it comes to Requisition Management. Yes before anyone says anything he is a fellow Aussie.

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17

The biggest issue we are having with ARM is the licensing model. There is one price for all users. We may have more approvers than requestors(!). ARM is unlike Epicor or DocStar where there are multiple licenses (Full, MES, Named, etc.) with various pricing. It just makes it very difficult to pay the same amount for a CEO who clicks approve on a mobile app as her assistant who is actually entering the reqs.

An interface to the Epicor RFQ system instead of going directly to orders would be nice too.

Sorry for bringing this up so much later but it’s on our minds at the moment.

Mark W.

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18

I built my own po processing system by adding a checkbox on the buyer called “Approver”. If a PO exceeds the buyers limit when it goes to pending status a BPM fires showing a BPM Data Form listing all the possible “Approvers”. After one is selected the BPM changes the approval person on the buyer record and triggers the approval workflow in Epicor. Then it used to send out an email with HTML table containing the po detail. The email also contained two links to approve or reject the email, the links would generate a new email message with relevant information and recipient. The recipient was a mailbox monitored by a scheduled task to process the PO’s. Now we are using Slack in place of the email workflow.

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