Functional Areas for Approval Processes

When used in approval processes, functional areas ensure that requests are routed to the correct approvers. This has the advantage of being able to use the same functional area variable for different approval process templates and create multiple requests.

Functional area variables may be added at any approval stage and used as placeholders. They are replaced with the respective approvers, based on the request details.

Click here to view a brief process of creating functional areas and adding them to approval stages in requests.

The steps below briefly describe the process of creating functional areas and using them in approval stages in requests.

Create the required functional area variables, for example, Connection and Role. For details, refer to the topic Functional Area Variable.
Create a functional area and add scopes (Sub Functional Areas) to it. You can add multiple scopes to a single functional area. For example, Target connection, and Role Name where Target connection is at the topmost level, and Role Name is the bottommost level. For details, refer to the section Creating a functional area.
- Associate a functional area variable to each scope. For example, for 'Target connection' associate the variable 'Connection'. For 'Role Name' associate the variable 'Role'.
- Provide a specific value and an approver to each scope. For example, for the variable Connection, give the value client 900. For the variable Role, give the value A_ALL. Assign User1 as the approver for both the variables.
Use this functional area variable while creating or modifying approval process templates. On the Approval Stages tab, select Add Functional Area Variables in the Approvers field. In an approval process template, instead of selecting specific approver names for approval stages, select the required functional area variables.

Note: Functional Area Variable added for a stage should be a leaf/bottom level of a hierarchy.
When a request is created with this approval process template, Infor Risk & Compliance checks all levels (sub areas) to see if it can find a match. If the request is created for a object associated with functional area variables, the request is routed to the approver selected in the functional area for that object.

For the above example, when a Role Assignment Request is created to assign the role A_ALL to a user in the connection 'client 900', User 1 (approver of the variable Role) will be the approver for this stage of the request.

You can also create functional areas with only one scope. For example, create a scope RoleName, add Role as the functional area variable, associate the value role A_ALL to the scope as select User 1 as the approver for this value. When a request is created with this approval process template, Infor Risk & Compliance checks to see if it can find a match. If this request is created to assign role A_ALL to a user, the request is routed to User 1 for approval.