Rebuild the OpenText VIM Chart of Authority after a landscape move
Approvals are not furniture
Teams treat the Chart of Authority as something that ships with the add-on. It does not. In OpenText VIM, approval routing for many invoice paths depends on rules you maintain: who may approve which amount, for which company code, cost object, or vendor class. When the landscape moves—ECC to S/4, private cloud / RISE cutover, company-code redesign, shared-services consolidation—those rules age quietly.
The operating mistake is copying the old CoA tables and declaring governance done. The binders were written for a different org chart, even when the process diagram looks identical.
What actually breaks
You do not need a dramatic failure. You need Tuesday morning:
An invoice sits because the approver ID no longer exists in the new system.
An invoice posts under a band that finance no longer allows for that cost center.
A substitute rule still points at a person who left during the project.
Non-PO and PO paths share a CoA assumption that was never true after the redesign.
None of that is a “VIM is broken” story. It is a CoA that was not rebuilt against live org data.
Rebuild, do not nostalgia-migrate
A practical rebuild, before volume:
Export the living org. Company codes in scope. Plants if they drive routing. Cost centers and WBS that appear on week-one invoices. Approval bands finance still owns on paper.
Name the roles, then the people. Role first (AP processor, cost center owner, procurement, tax). People second. Substitutes third.
Separate PO and non-PO where the business already separated them. Stretching one CoA across both paths is how exceptions become folklore.
Test with ugly invoices. Credit memos, high-value non-PO, cross-company, one missing cost object. Happy-path PO invoices will lie to you.
Write the change control. Who may edit CoA after go-live, in which client, with which ticket type. Unowned CoA drifts within a quarter.
Who carries it? The finance process owner signs the bands. AP confirms the queues. Basis or security confirms the user IDs and roles exist. The VIM functional lead wires the rules. No single “IT owns approvals” sentence.
Clean core reading
Keep authority in the process layer you already run inside VIM and SAP. Do not invent a side spreadsheet of approvers that nobody reconciles to the system. Do not promise “AI will route it” as a substitute for a named Chart of Authority. AI can assist extraction and suggestions later; it does not replace who is allowed to approve spend.
A one-meeting agenda
What company codes post in the first thirty days?
Which bands are policy vs habit?
Which roles are vacant on day one?
Which substitutes are tested?
Where does an unassigned invoice go, and who empties that queue daily?
Leave the meeting with a dated CoA owner and a re-test date after the first month of volume. That is stewardship, not theater.