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Requisiton Workflow Hiearchy based on cost centres

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Posted on by Max Hentschel

Good afternoon all,

I was searching already a lot about my problem, but couldn't find anything specific.

I'd like to setup a purchase requisition line approval workflow which is fine so far.

Because everything is based on cost centres we'd like to approve the lines based on a cost centre hierarchy.

Unfortunately you cannot choose any hierarchy other than the Managerial Hierarchy, except you tell me different?

What we'd like to have is the following scenario:

Cost centre 1234 has a responsible Person "Marc", Marc reports on a managerial level to "Martin"

Me (Max) is a requisitioner and reports to "David"

In our scenario, anyone can raise a purchase requisition line to cost centre 1234.

Now, Max is raising a PR line to cost centre 1234 and Submits the PR.

We'd like to have the hierarchy to go first to the cost centre responsible person (entered in the PR line), which is "Marc", and from there it follows the managerial hierarchy

If Marcs limit isn't enough, it needs to go additionally to his supervisor "Martin" and so on.

Would this require a modification to work properly or is it something AX2012 offers by default without high maintenance (over 100 cost centres).

Looking forward to your answers

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Vilmos Kintera 46,149 on at

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RE: 2012 R3 CU11- Requisiton Workflow Hiearchy based on cost centres

I cannot comment if this specific scenario is working now out of the box, but when I touched approvals couple of years back in 2012 RTM we could only select that hierarchy at the time.

We had a requirement to do automatic approvals based on signing limits, also factoring in financial dimensions for the limits. That had to be heavily customized for the signing limit form.

The second requirement was that for EU and US they wanted the workflow to function different, whereas one approval in one case would go through the whole chain of approvers for the same financial dimension department until someone had enough limit to approve, while the other continent required it to be a direct assignment to the manager who can straight away approve it.

Our solution was to implement a custom workflow hierarchy provider:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/EN-US/library/cc586005.aspx

With the combination of these two changes we could achieve the above requirements - we could select our own hierarchy and the custom hierarchy provider, independently of the Managerial hierarchy.

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RE: 2012 R3 CU11- Requisiton Workflow Hiearchy based on cost centres

Hi Max,

What we have done in this instance is to add a conditional node for cost center; CC1, CC2, CC3 etc. And have an approval node linked to each department. In the second level you can setup a hierarchy on value based approvals for that Cost Center based on conditions. The condition would be where dimension.costcentre = CC1 See below example of this:

Hopefully this brief explanation will help but we had scaled this out to over 45 departments and around 65 approvers and it works really well.

Regards,

Bruce

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Max Hentschel 70 on at

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RE: Requisiton Workflow Hiearchy based on cost centres

Hi Bruce,

thanks, that helps already. Do you assign the second bit with the steps directly to the User, or do you use something different to have more flexibility?

And how would you stop the Workflow steps earlier, e.g. I want to stop the steps as soon as someones Spending limit is not exceeded?

Thanks

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RE: Requisiton Workflow Hiearchy based on cost centres

Hi Max,

For the hierarchy I would suggest using user groups (sys admin > user > user groups) to mimic your hierarchy. 1 user group = 1 person in the hierarchy and you can build up the approvals based on this. Using users would also work but it is easier to change the user groups than going into the workflow and manually amending.

In terms of approval levels you should set conditional decisions on the lower level approval nodes (Marc, Mike Max). You should set the condition of the first node (Marc) to 'always run', then set the second node (mike) to only run when 'amount > £5000'. In this case I have assumed Marcs approval limit is £5000. Similarly you would then set the condition on the final node to only run when 'amount > £20,000'. In this case if the requisition is under Mike and Max's approval limit only Marc will have to approve and the workflow will by-pass the other two approvers.

Hopefully this helps.

Regards,

Bruce

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Jonathan Halland 11,310 on at

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RE: Requisiton Workflow Hiearchy based on cost centres

Hi Guys.

I have found that doing this in type of thing in configuration is really unmanageable as the number of dimension (cost center) values increases. Its much easier to build a custom "Participant provider" that returns the Dimension value (cost center) owner based on whatever is selected on the original document. Its just a relatively few lines of code. PM me with your email address and I can provide you with some of this code. Hopefully I'll get around to a full blog post about this in the near future.

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