The situation
Purchase requests, leave, budget sign-off, vendor onboarding. Each one has a real policy behind it. Each one is executed by forwarding a document to the right person and hoping they are at their desk.
The cost is rarely the approval itself. It is the chasing, the re-entry into a second system afterwards, and the fact that no one can answer “where is this now” without asking three people.
Our approach
We model the policy as it is actually enforced, including the exceptions people have quietly agreed to. Then we build the flow around it: a single request form, routing rules, delegation when someone is away, and a status every requester can see themselves.
What changes
You can measure how long an approval takes, so you can shorten it. The audit trail writes itself as people work, and the policy stops living only in the heads of the people who have been there longest.
