Ventrax
Operations
Why your approval process is slow (it is usually not the approver)
Approvals stall in the gaps between people, not on anyone’s desk. Measuring the gaps is what makes them shrink.
When a deal takes eleven days to approve, everyone assumes somebody sat on it. Usually nobody did.
Where the time goes
Break an eleven-day approval into its parts and it typically looks like this:
- Two days before it was submitted at all, while the salesperson gathered documents
- Three days waiting because the approver did not know it was there
- Four hours of actual consideration
- Three days returned for a missing document, then resubmitted
- Two days waiting on the second approver, who was travelling
Total decision time: half a day. Total elapsed time: eleven days. Nobody was slow.
The four gaps
Assembly. Time spent collecting what the approval needs. Falls to nearly zero when the system attaches the customer, the unit and the payment history automatically.
Notification. Time between arrival and awareness. This is the largest single gap in most businesses and the cheapest to fix.
Return loops. Each rejection for a missing document costs a full cycle. Validation before submission removes most of them.
Absence. Somebody travelled and nobody could act. Fixed by time-boxed delegation that is recorded, not by asking people to check email on holiday.
Measure before you redesign
Most approval redesigns start with removing approval steps, which is the wrong end. Record four timestamps on every approval:
- when it was requested
- when the approver first opened it
- when they decided
- when it was executed
The gap between the first two is awareness. Between the second and third is genuine consideration. Between third and fourth is execution.
Once you can see which gap is largest, the fix is usually obvious and rarely involves removing a control.
When to remove a step
Sometimes the answer genuinely is fewer approvers. The honest test: has this approver ever rejected anything?
An approval step that has never once changed an outcome is not a control. It is a delay with a job title attached, and removing it improves both speed and the seriousness with which the remaining steps are taken.