Approvals

Accurate, secure transactions require that a second individual approve some electronic marketplace actions before they proceed. This individual, called an approver, can accept or reject requests to perform a specific action. During the organization registration process, the organization administrator selects the business processes for which they want to enable approval. This is done by signing up for the appropriate approval member group during membership registration. The organization administrator also populates the approver member groups. Only users within these groups have the authority to accept or reject requests to perform those actions for which approval has been enabled.

There are five approver member groups, one for each business process to which approvals can be applied:

contract submission
order process
reseller and buyer registration
RFQ response
user registration

For example, when an organization signs up for RFQ response approvals, an RFQ response approval member group is created for the organization. All of the organization's users who have been given a Sales Manager role will be implicitly placed into this group. The organization administrator can add or modify the rules determining which user roles are implicitly placed within a particular approval member group. They can also explicitly place users within a particular approval member group.

Use the Organization Administration Console and WebSphere Commerce Accelerator to manage approvals. Note that approval requests and approval submissions are two different ways of looking at the same thing:

Approval requests are approvals that have been submitted and require an approver's attention
Approval submissions are requests that you have made and are waiting for approval

You can work with approval requests by using the Organization Administration Console. As well, you can use the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator to work with both approval requests and submissions.

The approval process also involves commands in the three following categories:

Preapproval task command: Preapproval task commands are run before the approval of an approvable action within a business process enabled for an organization. For example, before order approval, the command that checks inventory is run to ensure that the product is in stock. If it is in stock, the approval request is passed on to the approver.
Post-approval task commands: If an approvable action is approved, a post-approval task commands, if any, is run. For example, the post-approve task command might automatically update an inventory.
Post-rejection task commands: If an approvable action is rejected, a post-rejection task command, if any, is run. For example, the post-reject task command might check the monetary value of the order and notify a manager if it is above a certain amount.