‘Go ahead’ – this one small phrase holds the key to big initiatives in your organization. Approvals play an important role in business & for continuity of operations. However, most businesses struggle with this key aspect as they are stuck with multiple transactional systems & applications forcing senior managers and leadership team to periodically hop from system to system just to grant approvals to requests pending for their attention. The challenges with these traditional, inefficient approval management often hide in plain sight. But there is a silver lining to it too. Modernizing approval management with a unified platform opens up new opportunities to make your senior managers more efficient, productive while giving your business operations a booster shot.
Challenges with traditional approval management
In our decades of experience working with global enterprises – from small businesses to large conglomerates, we learned that inefficient approval management is the culprit of delays in projects, procurements, or any key initiatives. Companies were and still are using traditional approval practices. By traditional we mean paper, email, or spreadsheet-based tracking and managing mechanism.
While many companies have deployed multiple digital solutions, such as custom apps or ERP, CRM, HRMS-based workflows etc, these systems are mostly siloed and still lack capabilities to meet modern-day demands as business user still needs to log into each such systems to review and approve the requests. So, we consider these unconnected, isolated digital approval systems also as legacy.
How are these legacy approval management systems impacting your productivity and profitability, you ask?
Delays and missed deadlines
With manual practices in approval management, requests often get buried down a heap of files or dozens of other email threads. If you fail to acknowledge the request and act on it on time, you might miss an opportunity for a lifetime. Can you afford to lose it?
Financial impacts
Let’s consider a real-estate company procuring construction materials. If the approval for procurement got delayed by a day or a week and material costs shot up due to geopolitical reasons, how much would it cost the company?
Inefficient approval management would eat up your company’s profits or close down new revenue streams.
Operational disruptions
Delays in approving requests for procurement or other operational requirements would disrupt your business. Imagine your procurement manager delayed the approval for procuring a critical spare part when you needed it to fix a machine. Until the shipment arrives, your entire production line will come to a grinding halt. No production means no deliveries and no revenue, doesn’t it?
Customer dissatisfaction
In customer-facing operations, any slight delay in approvals would directly hit the customer’s business or operations. For example, a product owner missed a request to deliver an add-on service to a customer to meet their peak season demand. This would incur the customer a huge loss and might lead to termination of the contract.
Compliance risks
Missed deadlines or delayed approvals in compliance-related matters, such as audit filing, can attract hefty penalties and damage brand reputation. Regulatory bodies are very strict about non-compliance. Effective approval management can help you avoid non-compliance and associated penalties.
Streamline approval management with a unified approvals solution
To understand unified approvals, let us explore what goes wrong with legacy systems.
As an approver, you would get requests from all sides – from the team, vendors, and customers. And these requests arrive on a variety of systems.
For instance, if you are a manager, your team members will send leave requests over the HRMS system. You need to keep track of the finance management system for budget approvals and vendor invoices. Your project management tool is where you need to keep track of the task approvals, project timelines, resource allocation requests, IT asset requests, etc. Sounds familiar?
So, you need to constantly keep an eye on your emails or keep checking all these systems for requests, switch tabs to track their status, and prioritize them as per the request deadlines. It’s all overwhelming and cumbersome with a lot of room for mistakes and missing out on what is important.
Now, let’s see a scenario with unified approvals solution where you see all the requests coming from every stakeholder on every LOB system in one place – Microsoft Teams. With a single click, you can see complete details of the request, such as department, deadline, priority, etc. You don’t have to switch to the LOB system until you need more detailed information on the request.
You approve or reject the request from the same place. You can also add your comments to give more context for the requestor or the next-level approver. You also have the option to re-assign or delegate, all within Teams.
When you get a new request or the deadline for a request is nearing, a Teams BOT integrated with the unified approvals solution sends you an alert. So you take proper action on time without a miss and ensure that you are not the cause for any operational bottlenecks.
Most importantly, the unified approvals system receives the user rights, privileges and permissions and surfaces the approval requests only as per those privileges. So, there is no need to create a separate user management and cause possible conflicts.
key features to look for in a unified approvals solution
To qualify as an efficient solution, a unified approvals system should have some essential features and capabilities. Let’s check out the list:
Seamless integration
As the name suggests, a unified approvals solution should integrate with all your LOB systems, such as HRMS, ITMS, ERP, etc., to enable you to manage requests raised on these systems.
A unified dashboard
The unified approvals solution should offer an intuitive, interactive dashboard with real-time information about all approvals, from Finance, HR, Operations, and you name it.
Notifications and alerts
To help you avoid delays in approvals, the solution should be able to read the timelines on the requests and send real-time alerts and email notifications to keep approvals on track.
Extensible and customizable
Approval workflows might change over time. The unified approvals solution should be customizable to cater to the changing workflows. It should also be extensible to facilitate requests from new LOB systems.
Persona driven
A request might involve multi-level approvals with stakeholders from different departments. Each persona would be authorized to see specific information about the request. The unified approvals solution should honor the role-specific access and permission guidelines to ensure privacy and security.
Want to see a unified approvals system in action for your business?
At Saxon AI, we built a unified approvals solution for streamlined approvals and enable businesses to operate with more agility and confidence. Over the past two decades, we have listened to the stories of our customers. We understood their challenges and the need for streamlined approval management. In response, we launched a future-ready unified approval solution that suits enterprises of all sizes from any industry.
We incorporated the unified approvals solution with our Proceso App for our leading enterprise customers, who are now experiencing the value of our solution.
Want to see our unified approvals solution in action for your business?