An approval delegate assumes an approver's quote approvalresponsibilities when the approver is not available. For examplean approver can delegate his quote approval responsibilities to anotheruser for times when the approver is traveling or on vacation. Similarlythe approval delegate can delegate his responsibilities to a differentapprover creating a delegation chain. For example Employee B canbe defined as the approval delegate for Employee A from 05/01/11 to05/08/11 and Employee C can be defined as the approval delegate forEmployee B from 05/01/11 to 05/08/11. In this example Employee Cis responsible for approving quotes from 05/01/11 to 05/08/11.

Enterprises support delegation chains except for instances wherea circular delegation occurs. In the earlier example Employee C cannotdelegate his quote approval responsibilities to Employee A or EmployeeB for the 05/01/11 to 05/08/11 date range because this delegationwould create a circular delegation chain.

Automatic approvals support approval delegation. For example asales representative delegates his quote approval responsibilitiesto his manager. The manager is higher in the quote's approvalsequence than the sales representative so when the manager approvesthe quote for the sales representative the quote is approved at themanager level and the sales representative level. In a similar examplea manager delegates his responsibilities to the sales representative.The sales representative is delegated to act at the manager levelso when the sales representative approves the quote it is approvedat the manager level and the sales representative level.

An approver can define multiple approval delegates for an effectivedate range by specifying a primary delegate as shown in the followingexample.