Removing manual approval chains from a 200-person organisation

The challenge

Nearly every operational action required approval, and approval meant an email thread that somebody had to remember to chase. Requests sat with whoever was busiest. There was no record of who approved what, and cycle time varied from hours to weeks depending on who was in the office.

What we did

We worked through this in stages, starting with what had to be true before anything else could be built.

1. Inventoried every approval process and measured actual cycle time from request to decision.
2. Automated the highest-volume, most rule-bound processes first, where the return was fastest and the risk lowest.
3. Built routed workflows with delegation rules so absence stopped being a bottleneck.
4. Kept a complete decision log for audit, and reported cycle time to management weekly during rollout.

The result

Measured against the baseline captured during discovery, not against a target chosen afterwards.

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