Hi TJ, I will jump in here and see if I can provide you some more details. I am a Client Engagement Partner in our Customer Management Organization working with clients just like you.
Delegation of approval authority allows users and administrators to temporarily assign, or delegate, approval authority from one user to another for a specified period of time. A user can delegate his own approval authority to another user. For example, if a manager is leaving town for a vacation, he might choose to delegate approval authority during the scheduled vacation time. Any Ariba Buyer user can delegate his own approval authority to another user from the Preferences screen.
A delegation of authority is a user profile change, and must be approved according to your corporation’s business rules for user profile changes. Ariba Buyer uses the ExpireDelegations scheduled task to enable and disable delegations of approval authority. This task determines when to remove delegations that have expired, or to activate those that are scheduled to go into effect. Typically you run this task once a day, to pick up any delegation changes scheduled for that day. An administrative user with the DelegateApprovalAuthority permission can delegate authority for another user. For example, if a manager leaves the office unexpectedly, an administrator can delegate that manager’s authority to another user. When an administrator delegates approval authority, the change takes effect immediately.
Delegations that are created by administrators are tracked by the ThirdPartyDelegation class. In Ariba Administrator, administrators with the DelegateApprovalAuthority permission have access to these tasks in the User Manager workspace:
• Create Delegation: Used to create delegations.
• List Delegation: Used to view and undo current delegations
Scoped Delegations in Suite Integrated Systems
Starting in Service Pack 15, in suite integrated systems, you can enable users to assign separate delegatees for procurement and strategic sourcing workflows. If you set the parameter System.Base.EnableScopedDelegation to true, users who are are authorized to work with both procurement and strategic sourcing will be able to create delegations based on scope. Customers upgrading to SP15 must manually add the parameter to Parameters.table in order to use this feature.
Hope this provides you with the information needed! If you are not a member, join my customer group on Exchange: http://exchange.ariba.com/groups/customer-success
Beverly Dunn
Client Engagement Partner