Approval mechanisms

Companies require approval mechanisms and strategies for a variety of reasons, mainly to ensure effective decision-making, maintain consistency, manage risks, and align with their goals and values. Here are some key reasons why companies implement approval strategies:

1. Control and Oversight - Approval strategies provide a structured process for reviewing and approving decisions. This control ensures that important decisions are not made haphazardly or without proper consideration. By establishing clear approval hierarchies, companies can prevent errors, oversights, or actions that might be detrimental to the organization.
2. Risk Management - Certain decisions can carry significant risks, whether financial, legal, reputational, or operational. An approval strategy helps assess and mitigate these risks by involving relevant stakeholders who can provide expertise and insights to ensure the decision aligns with the company's risk tolerance and compliance standards.
3. Consistency - Companies often aim to maintain consistency in their operations, branding, and messaging. Approval strategies help ensure that decisions are aligned with established guidelines and standards. This consistency is crucial for maintaining a strong brand image and delivering a unified experience to customers, partners, and employees.
4. Resource Allocation - Decisions related to resource allocation, budgeting, and expenditures can impact the company's financial health. An approval strategy helps ensure that resources are allocated wisely, optimizing the company's financial performance and preventing wastage.
5. Alignment with Goals - Companies have specific objectives, mission statements, and strategic goals. Approval strategies help ensure that decisions made at various levels of the organization are aligned with these broader goals, contributing to the company's overall success.
6. Regulatory and Legal Compliance - Many industries are subject to strict regulations and legal requirements. An approval strategy helps ensure that decisions and actions taken by the company adhere to these regulations. This can help prevent legal issues, fines, or other negative consequences that may arise from non-compliance.

Approval strategy types

Purchase or internal order approvals

Before the processing of a purchase order or internal order may start, each order needs to fulfll these four approval criteria:

• Financial approval - Depending on defined financial approval settings, different parties need to approve the order. The financial approval type for an order is defined by the shopping purpose, but can be overridden by classification elements of the products on the order.
• Material approval - Special product groups require a product group manager to approve the order before it is granted (e.g. shotguns). The material approval type for an order is defined by classification elements of the products on the order. Please note that each product on an order may trigger its own material approval process, e.g. if different staff are responsible for different materials. (guns vs. ppe)
• Team manager approval - when staff is ordering through the team ordering assistant, you may define that team managers have to approve each or specific orders. The applicable team manager approval is defined within the shopping purpose.
• Personal equipment approval - If defined, personal equipment ordering assistant may permit the violation of organizational rules, but then requires the authorization of a team leader.

Depending on the business context (e.g. Shopping Purpose, ... ) zero to all of these approval types may be relevant. If an approval type is not relevant to an order it automatically is considered to have received this approval type.

Digital creation approvals

Creating b-op digitals sometimes requires approval, e.g. when customers are registering as new digitals and will be provided their own shop on behalf of another digital. For this purpose B-Op offers a digital deployment service, which supports approval processes before it starts the creation. The applicable digital creation approval strategy is defined in with the digital creation request, which is generated by the application page. (hard coded)

Specifics to approval strategy types

Default approval strategy

For each approval strategy type you may define one default strategy. When picking a strategy, e.g. for digital creation of within a shopping purpose you always have the option "Use default approval strategy" instead of selecting a specific approval strategy. This allows central manipulation of approval strategies without the need to locate each place where it was used.

Financial approval priority

Financial approval strategies offer the option to define a priority. This is required as there are multiple sources of authority to define the appropriate financial approval strategy which might result in multiple applicable financial approval strategies. For this case exist priority. Always the one with the highest priority will be used (highest priority is 1).

Example: Shopping purpose says that orders have to undergo a financial approval strategy A, which has priority 3. But on the same order there are products, which are registered with a classification element which forces a financial approval strategy B, which has priority 2. As a result, the order will have to undergo strategy B, as it has the higher priority.

Related articles

• App:Approval strategies administration - This app allows approval strategies, which can be bound to many approval govering objects
• Dev:Financial approval strategy settings
• App:Task manager - This app allows responsible persons to grant or reject approvals
• Dev:Approval agent - The central service, which governs the approval process depending on the settings made in the applicable approval strategy.
• Dev:Digital deployment service - The central service for automatic deployment of digitals.