Shopping Cart Approval Template

After you create a Buying Organization, you can configure a Shopping Cart Approval Template to manage Shopping Carts through the workflow approval process. For more information on workflow, see the Procurement Installation Guide (for your operating system and database).

Consider this system behavior when you configure approval templates:

• If you create a Buying Organization that is at the highest level in a hierarchy of organizations, you must configure an Approval Template to enable Workflow Service.
• By default, the workflow business rules you establish for an organization will apply to Shopping Carts submitted in the organization. If the rule is not established for a child organization, Workflow Service will search the parent Buying Organization for the rule.

Therefore, you only need to configure the template for a Buying Organization at the highest level in a hierarchy. For more information about parent and child organizations, see Business Rules in the Overview Help module.

To create or edit a Shopping Cart Approval Template for each organization, see Shopping Cart Approval Template in the Administer Organizations Help module.

This table describes the difference between a serial approval and a parallel approval.

Step Type	Definition
Serial Approval	This sends a type of Shopping Cart to one approver or approval group at a time. For example, consider a Shopping Cart that must have approval by two commodity approvers or approval groups. In a serial approval, one commodity approver or group must approve the Shopping Cart first, and then the Shopping Cart is sent to the other approver / approval group.
Parallel Approval	This enables you to send a Shopping Cart to multiple approvers at the same time. If a Shopping Cart is associated with more than one business rule, the system sends the Shopping Cart for approval simultaneously to those specified in the business rule. For example, if a Shopping Cart must have approval by a commodity manager and a spending limit approver, then parallel approvals enables both people to receive the Shopping Cart at the same time.