The Feature

Automatic Timecard Approval for Terminated Employees

July 18, 2006 on 8:18 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Feature of the Week | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

You may encounter this feature if using Oracle Time and Labor and Oracle Projects 11i.10.

The Feature

Employees enter their project-related timecards in OTL and you want to import them to Oracle Projects. If the timecards are automatically approved by the Workflow Background Process (OTL Workflows for Employees item), they will not get approved for terminated employees and contingent workers. It appears the date of the approval process must fall within the person’s period of employment or placement to complete successfully. If the approval process is outside of the period of employment/placement the approval process fails with the error message ‘ORA-20001: This person does not have preferences for the selected effective date’, which generates an email to the System Administrator.

The Metalink Note 338716.1 describes a similar issue. In the note, Oracle recommends disabling the deferred approval option and approving timecards instantly upon their submission. This would not work because it leaves users with no option to withdraw and correct their timecards once they were submitted.

The Workaround

You need to reverse the terminations for the people on the unapproved timecards list and use the $FND_TOP/sql/wfretry.sql script to approve their timecards. Then run the PRC: Transaction Import Process in Projects to interface the timecards to Projects. And last but not least re-enter the employee terminations.

Another way to avoid this situation is to implement timecard approval by supervisor or project manager. However for those who do require this kind of approval and want to approve timecards automatically, it would be very helpful if the Workflow Background Process had a date parameter, so that it would be possible to run the approval process for past dates.