Setting up Approval Process in PeopleSoft Approval Workflow Engine (AWE)

Being part of an organization which houses its HRIS system in PeopleSoft, we as an employee do various  Self Service transactions like submit a planned leave request for a week or so which then goes to manager for their approval and upon final approval the database changes are done eventually. Let's talk about a typical transfer process which involves certain steps. Assume a manager raises a transfer request for one of their direct reports. The request is routed through a series of approval involving following stakeholders:

1. N+2 (Requester's Manager)
2. N+3 (Manager's Manger)
3. HR Head

The transfer request goes through following steps:

1. Manager raises the request for one of it's direct reports using Transfer Employee component (MSS > Job and Personal Information > Transfer Employee).
2. The component Transfer Employee checks whether approval is required for this transaction from the page Workflow Configuration (Setup HRMS > Common Definition > Self Service > Workflow Configuration) then checks what approval process is attached with this transaction from the page Workflow Transactions (Setup HRMS > Common Definitions > Approvals > Workflow Transactions) If the approval is required then it submits the transaction to AWE.
3. AWE identifies the approval process definition passed by transaction component, reviews the process setup from Approval Process Setup page (Setup HRMS > Common Definitions > Approvals > Approval Process Setup) to determine the next approver in the approval chain.
4. AWE then checks whether email notifications have been configured for this approval process from the page Transaction Configuration (Setup HRMS > Common Definitions > Approvals > Transaction Configuration)  and then determines what should be the mode of communication (Email or Worklist or Both) to the next approver. It then notifies next approver accordingly and updates the Header Record (HR_TRANSFER_DAT) and Cross Reference Table (HR_TRANSFER_XREF) through the 'Approval Event Handler Class' all mentioned in the Transaction Registry Page (Setup HRMS > Common Definitions > Approvals > Transaction Registry).
5. Approver approves the transfer request which came from previous steps, through the page Approve Transfers (MSS > Job and Personal Information > Approve Transfer) upon which AWE again updates all the records mentioned in the step 4.
6. Step 4 and Step 5 are repeated until request has been approved by all the approvers.
7. Once the request is approved by all the approvers , HR Admin opens the page Employee Transfer Requests (Workforce Administration > Self Service Transactions > Employee Transfer Requests), select appropriate option and click on 'Save' which ultimately updates the database i.e adds a transfer row in Job Data component.

Things are quite clear so far but one question arises here, What is this Approval Workflow Engine (AWE) that I just mentioned about in the above transfer business process ?
As it's name suggests, Its an engine which drives an approval process of different kinds. It provides capabilities creating, running and managing approval processes.

Well, as I always say the best way to learn something in PeopleSoft is to do a hands on. So lets get into some real business and see how exactly an approval process is setup with AWE in PeopleSOft. The requirement is to create an approval process which we saw in the beginning in AWE. This process will include following roles in the approval chain:

1. N+2 (Originator's Manager where originator itself is a manager)
2. N+3 (Manager's Manager)
3. HR Head

Most of us who are not much familiar with AWE might think that doing the setup and configuration in AWE is all it takes to implement an entire approval process in PeopleSoft but let me tell you there are whole lot of other things that has to be done before we could even touch the AWE setup part. Having said that, following are the three major parts in this entire implementation:

The elements highlighted in red in above diagrams are the ones we actually need to create however, their names have been given from the perspective of a transfer process that we are going to setup. But you can give your own name which suits your needs best.

In the following articles I will explain each of these steps to setup a transfer approval process.