Oracle introduced the 'Area of Responsibility' or 'AOR' quite some time ago. The feature enables to map employees to different owners of transactions. For example, we can define someone as a business unit or a location head and map employees to this individual.
The GUI for setting up approvals has been around since Release 8 and AOR has been available in it for a while as well. While discussing business processes with a customer, the customer asks how will approvals work when you transfer someone from one business unit to another and whether it is possible to send it for approval to the current approver/AOR and future approver/AOR. While most of us are aware of the AOR feature available, I wasn't sure whether the system could handle this kind of scenario so I resorted to my trusted tool My Oracle Support (MOS).
The challenge with such a situation is that there is no error message, so what exactly would I search? I went ahead and did a search for 'Approvals representative'. I got many options and none of them helped.
It's at this point, I remembered reading about the 'Toyota Production System'. Toyota makes some of the world's best cars because of their focus on quality. One of the tools used in Total Quality Management (TQM) is 'Source Inspection'. I applied this technique and went on an exploratory search of the approvals GUI.
On opening the feature, I was pleasantly surprised to see the solution.
