Users-Approvers from SAP to Coupa
Integration may be completed via Coupa Standard Flat File Format or our REST-based API for creating and maintaining users. Given the scope of the user activity within Coupa, we have a simplified model for User management within Coupa. That said, the below considerations could have a large impact on your integration efforts for the User objects:
- Approval Limits - To ensure that your users accurately reflect the approval limits in comparison to SAP.
- Large organizational changes - While not common, these should be considered for your integration design and possibly scope-in or out based on cost/benefit analysis.
- Content Security - In Coupa you can control access to the catalog content and based on your business requirements to segregate the catalog content across different business groups or operating units.
- G/L Account Code access and security - If the usage of your charge codes is designed in a way to provide necessary controls around the ability of different users to charge to different accounts, there is potential for designing the billing account security into the User integration.
If you implement SAML or other external Authentication mechanisms, then it'd also be required to address the necessary Key attributes on the User record to facilitate seamless single sign-onWhile you might standardize on a specific Coupa role to assign to all new employees, when your users move from one Business Unit to another within in SAP, you'll generally need to consider the potential role changes and content security along with that change.
Here is an example of a standard flat-file that can be produced to load your User profile data along with the attributes mentioned above:
Sample users data file (save as CSV)
How we integrate approvers will depend on the requirements and complexity of your business rules. For relatively simple business rules such as cost center or project approvers, we can easily map an approver to each individual element through the use of Coupa’s Lookup Values (see the Accounting Data section for more details). The approver can be sent along with each cost center or project value in a format similar to the following sample file:
Sample lookup value approver file
For more complex business rules, Coupa’s Approval Chains functionality can be used which gives you the ability to define complex conditions, dollar limits, priority, and individual or group approvers:
These approval chains can either be maintained directly in Coupa or via flat-file integration if needed:
Also note that you can have both Lookup Value approvers and complex approval chains to support your full set of business approval rules.