Approval work flow engine

   Purchase requisitions, training requests, and employee transfers are some of the many enterprise transactions that require approval. Some transactions, such as training requests, may require a single-level manager or supervisor approval; other  transactions may use complex routing rules to determine the approval path. For example, a purchase requisition for an item costing $10,000 or less may require no
more than a manager’s signature, whereas a purchase requisition for a single item costing $100,000 or more may require a senior vice president’s approval. Prior to electronic workflow systems, the approval process consisted of signed forms routed from one approver to the next.

      Prior to PeopleTools 8.48 and PeopleSoft 9.0, PeopleSoft applications used a PeopleTools approval framework called Virtual Approver. In PeopleTools 8.48, PeopleSoft introduced the Approval Workflow Engine (AWE).

            The main intention behind the introduction of Approval Workflow Engine was to reduce the amount of coding required to configure Approval Workflows / Routing thus enabling the functional users to configure the workflow themselves once the initial development was done by a developer. This goes inline with the fact that Fusion also would be mostly configurable, thus reducing the maintenance cost. All of the steps in approval workflow are defined using PeopleSoft pages and not PeopleCode. Therefore, functional users can design and maintain workflows using these online PeopleSoft pages instead of requiring technical developers to create workflow rules.

Navigation :In HCM, the menu navigation for AWE is under Set Up HRMS | Common Definitions | Approvals.