ERP Cloud Day 2019: Oracle Expenses Delegation Configurations

Posted by Harry E Fowler
Last updated 1/20/20
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As part of Quest’s 2019 Cloud Webinar Series – ERP Cloud Day, Angela Beckman from YUM! Brands, Inc., spoke about how YUM! Brands leveraged the Oracle Expenses module in ERP Cloud to allow management to focus on what is most important in the business while maintaining the necessary oversight to prevent fraud.

About YUM! Brands

YUM! Brands is the parent company of KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut. It is a Fortune 500 Company that leverages the following Oracle Cloud modules – HR, Benefits, Time and Labor, Absence Management, Fusion Financials (FL, AP, Expense), and HR Helpdesk. Company-wide, YUM! Brands employs over 30,000 people with 48,000 restaurants in over 140 countries. YUM! Brands opens eight new restaurants per day.

As for their Oracle lifespan, YUM! Brands started in a highly customized PeopleSoft 8.4. In late 2014, they made the strategic decision to retire the mainframe system. They took the upgrade to 9.2 and then embarked on a journey to the Cloud. They spent 2015 evaluating options, and they finalized their selection of Oracle Cloud in early 2016.

The project kicked off in April 2016 and YUM! Brands went live with their first wave on Oracle Cloud in July 2017 – including only YUM! corporate employees. This was a group of about 2,000 users who could test out the features. Wave 2 went live in January 2019 – bringing the remaining 28,000 employees onboard.

Oracle Expenses Delegation Configurations

Approval Workflow Setups

YUM! uses approval workflow with “IF/THEN” rules. Expense Report Totals at or above 1,000,000, employee payroll for all active employees, and the Tax Payload Owner username are all run through the approvals process. YUM!’s CEO obtains approval from the CFO, so he is not included in this list. For inactive employees and the CEO, there is a different set of routing. The image below will show these IF conditions.

Oracel Expenses report manager approval rule

The expense report manager approval rule changed with an update that requires the owner username in the coding. Otherwise, the rules will not work. The slide below shows exactly what must be entered in order for your THEN results to respond accurately.

report rule set

YUM! uses a Delegate Approver Rule that is displayed below. It triggers when the supervisor is not null, and the owner is not the CEO.

Oracle Expenses delegate approver rule

Required HCM Profile Elements

In order for a user to access the expense module, he or she must have a manager or supervisor on their HCM profile. This manager must be active – payroll eligible. Second, they need a default expense account.

Delegations

Delegations are the catalyst for a healthy work-life balance. They assign specific tasks to the most effective user. YUM! Brands gave the example that time is money, and labor costs more if the CEO creates an expense report than if his administrator does the same. They wanted to free up their highest-level employees to focus on successfully opening their eight restaurants per day and other extremely important tasks. These reasons played into YUM! Brands’ decision to use delegations.

Administrative Delegation Assignments

For the YUM! Brands example, a vacation rule was set up while the CEO was unavailable. His delegate approver would be his administrator. First, YUM! Brands set a start and end date for the rule. Then, they created an IF statement in which the creator and user “isn’t” the admin. This was done so that the admin would not have the ability to approve her own expenses. Those expenses would go to the CEO’s desk and remain there until he was back in the office. During the CEO’s absence, his admin had all of the functionality that a regular approver would.

Oracle Expenses admin setup

Another option is to use a Delegate Submitter. This is ideal for users who are not able to complete reports in a timely manner according to business regulations. In this case, a delegate can be assigned to submit expense reports for approval on their behalf. It is also handy if an employee needs to be walked through how to do a task that he or she is assigned. The YUM! example is available to be viewed below.

delegate sub 1

delegate sub 2

User Delegation Assignments

These assignments are available to all users in order to assign delegations. A user can set up their own vacation period and delegate. He or she must click “Enable vacation period” for the rule to be assigned. Once their data is set up, they click Save. Again, it is important that the delegated approver does not have access to approve their own reports.

Oracle Expenses user delegation assignment

If a user wants someone else to be able to submit his or her reports, they can manage delegates. The first tab below will show allowed delegates – those who have access to their information. The next tab shows who the user is a delegate on behalf of.

Oracle Expenses user delegation assignment 2

Oracle Expenses user delegation assignment 3

Security and Audit

Mercer University defined Internal Control Objectives in the following way:

Reliability of financial reporting
Effectiveness and efficiency of operations
Compliance with applicable laws and regulations

YUM! Brands has set up security and audit rules to achieve each of these objectives. To do so, they created a log of expense report submissions or approvals which is a parallel workflow showing when the report was delegated or reassigned with a timestamp. They also made user or admin-controlled delegations and vacation rules with limits on who can create delegations. Finally, they applied specific rules to prevent delegate approver from approving their own reports. This prevents fraudulent submissions and approvals in Oracle Expenses. An illustration of the login action can be pulled up to share with an employee in the case that he or she claims they were not compensated for their expenses.

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