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Approvals are a critical process in any business, particularly around financial decisions. Proper approval management helps to ensure compliance, and maintain fair and balanced business decisions while also providing transparency and efficiency for those involved.
To establish a standardized and transparent approval process, you can build a workflow of business steps to follow. Some of these steps can be automated to improve efficiency and timeliness. A standard approval workflow will include the following steps: - Submit request: A user will initiate the request that needs approving. This involves submitting information, often via a form over email or a software system. - Review: The request is sent to another stakeholder to check that it meets thresholds and is in line with policies (both internal and external) and has no mistakes. They may want to request additional supporting documents. - Routing: For more advanced and important approvals, the request may need to be routed to different departments or team members for further approvals, such as a legal team or the finance department. - Evaluation: Stakeholders will review the request and any supporting documents to make a balanced decision. Depending on the nature of the request, they will have to consider elements such as financial, legal, HR and consider the resources, time and money needed to complete the request. - Decision (approval/rejection): Based on the evaluation and the information available, the stakeholders can either approve or reject the request. - (Resubmission if rejected): If the request was rejected, it may be possible for the initial requester to resubmit the request once they have made the necessary adjustments. - Closure: Once the approval has been made, the related business processes and tasks can be completed and the case can be closed now that the process is complete.
Approvals have historically been carried out manually; and still are in many scenarios. When approvals are performed on paper, or digital documents exchanged over email this still provides a paper trail, but is not an efficient or effective way to carry out the process. It can pose numerous challenges:
Limited visibility: It can be hard to know the status of the approval request, which can sometimes lead to bottlenecks and makes progress unclear to all stakeholders involved.
Risk of errors: Manual data entry and manually sending documents and attachments to stakeholders can lead to accidental mistakes or forgetting to include important information.
No standardization: Without a clearly defined process, steps can be missed out or bias (both conscious and unconscious) can be introduced to the approval. All approvals should follow the same process for fairness, consistency and compliance.
Difficulty in compliance: Manually maintaining compliance is a challenge. Failure to comply could lead to huge repercussions. Automated workflows ensure that all rules and regulations are adhered to, and can automatically produce audit trails to prove compliance.
Slow and inefficient: It’s time consuming to manually address issues at each step of the approval process, as well as manually chasing other stakeholders for to complete their part of their process. This distracts from more strategic business activities.
Not agile or scalable: If you need to change aspects of the approval process due to unforeseen circumstances, or even planned, changes to operations, you don’t want this to cause more issues. And its hard to replicate or expand the process on a larger scale should your business grow.
The approval process can be automated to address all these challenges above. Using a digital platform, you can map out your process, as outlined in the steps above, and automate these steps so to enhance efficiency.
You can automate the approval process by automating the hand-off of work between stakeholders. The stakeholder enters the information into the system, and it automatically directs the information to the appropriate person and keeps a real-time record of what stage the approval is at. This will also trigger notifications so stakeholders will be kept informed of progress.
Automation can also be applied to information entry and upload, with forms providing intelligent features, such as OCR if copying information from paper forms, or auto-fill for common entries.
There are numerous examples of approval processes that can be automated. The following companies have used Bizagi to automate their approvals:
Banking & financial approvals
AEON Credit Service: Credit card approval – The financial services company was able to speed up its credit card application using process automation to approve lines of credit in-store for new customers. The process, which previously took over two weeks as customers had to fill out a paper form in-branch, is now automated to approve credit limits in under 30 minutes and provide customers with ready-to-use credit cards on the spot.
AgFirst: Loan approval – The largest agricultural lender in the US used Bizagi to automate business processes and create an agile and robust business process to adapt to customers' needs while maintaining compliance. 100% of information requests made by Loan Approvers are now completed on time, which helped to close cases 60% faster than expected.
Sales & finance approvals
CBC: Pricing approval – The largest soft drinks bottler in South America transformed its pricing and promotional process with Bizagi. It previously took 24 hours to gain approval of a promotional pricing offer, and it now takes just three hours: an impressive 12x faster, thanks in part to the ability to authorize approvals via the mobile app.
Kyocera: Pricing approval – The global printing manufacturer automated their special pricing approval process, which was previously paper-based, to bring visibility and speed to the process. This increased their opportunity to win business deals. They reduced the average process time by 85%, from 10 days to 1.5 days and integrated Bizagi with SAP to directly activate business opportunities.
Unilever International: Pricing approval – The global consumer goods company previously managed product portfolios in Excel, which made official approvals cumbersome as they checked correct pricing to minimize the risk of revenue loss. This is now managed in Bizagi, with a master data sync to SAP, enforced by automated approvals and audits to prove compliance. A pricing framework can now be completed in 15 minutes, 3x faster than before, and the average turnaround for pricing approval is 1.4 days, a process cycle reduction of 50%.
Purchasing approvals
Super Bock Group: Purchase request approval - The multi-national beverage company automated numerous business processes with Bizagi to enhance their supply chain, including their purchase request approval process and made it entirely mobile to enable fast responses by employees in the field.
Quala: Purchase approvals – The consumer goods enterprise deployed Bizagi’s low-code platform to aid the finance and marketing departments with transparency, process standardization and compliance. They reduced the purchase approval times by 80% to just two hours on average, which eliminated lost purchasing opportunities.
Contract approvals
Adidas: Sports asset contract approval – The global sports apparel brand automated its contract approvals for sports clubs and well-known athletes, which involves multiple approvals and contract negotiations. The process now has a traceable workflow in Bizagi, with contract approval forms processed in just a few days, reducing the process cycle time by 88% as it previously took up to two months to complete.
Luxury fashion & beauty brand: Campaign management approval - Multiple teams are involved in getting a product ready to launch into stores. It was previously carried out over Excel spreadsheets, with approvals gained by asking senior members of staff over Teams. The process is now mapped out and automated in Bizagi providing standardization and visibility from start to finish. To eliminate bottlenecks and provide accountability, the 115 active users automatically receive email notifications when they need to take an action and approvals can be made directly through emails, rather than going into the system, saving even more time for executives.
Approvals automation software
Approval automation software can be used to support and standardize your approval process. There are various software platforms that can be used, many that are based on workflows and process models that form the basis of the process, readying it for automation.
This helps to visualize and manage the process and is particularly helpful with more complex processes that include multiple stakeholders or conditions.
When selecting an automation platform, you should look for one that provides ease of use, perhaps in the form of low-code building features, such as drag and drop composers or wizards that ease the automation process. You should also consider a platform that integrates with the rest of your tech stack and provides comprehensive analytics and reporting.
Try Bizagi’s low-code platform for approval automation
Bizagi’s low-code platform provides an easy and stable way to create approval workflows for standardization and clarity, with automation to reduce process bottlenecks and increase operational efficiency.
Find out more about how the platform can support you.
