The success of an organization depends heavily on its speed of execution. With faster decision-making, organizations can get things done faster and thus achieve better alignment to goals in general.
Most companies rely on manual operations for decision-making and approvals, despite these processes being closely intertwined with everyday work and prone to delays. They try to fasten these processes by driving efficiency in manual operations or by computerizing individual actions rather than automating the end-to-end process with approval automation.
What is Approval Management?
Approval Management refers to the set of rules that every organization follows to approve any process or request pertaining to a business decision. If the predefined conditions are true, the request will be approved. Approval management consists of approvers assessing compliance with rules at every level of approval.
Faster execution is a product of faster decision making and overall process efficiency. Approval workflow can help you achieve both if implemented right. So, what are the key benefits of adopting approval automation? Let’s take a look.
Benefits of Automating Your Approval Process
Besides the speed of execution and efficiency, here are the top reasons why you should automate your approval workflow process.
Benefits of Automated Approval Management
1. Increased Productivity
Every level of approval, if not automated, is a separate task in itself. What should be quick steps in the overall decision-making can turn into regular interruptions in the routine of your employees. With faster and clearer communication, you can get things done faster. Approval workflow assists the stakeholders with maximum context at every touchpoint, thus boosting the efficiency of your ecosystem.
2. Maximum Compliance
As discussed, you can implement workflow automation once and ensure process compliance every single day. A process orchestrated by a system standardizes your approval process and trains it to run on autopilot. From the first approver to the final approver, everyone is contextually guided upfront on the rules to comply with. Standardization becomes paramount with regard to approval management where the probability of unchecked mistakes and mismanagement runs high.
3. Higher Transparency, Trust, and Control
Decision-making is a highly collaborative process where you need teams operating in the perfect agreement of how a process should be carried out. Any discrepancy there can hinder the smooth handoff of information pertaining to the end decisions. With all the decisions and their supporting reasons captured in the approval workflow, you are ensuring a single source of truth for all involved stakeholders. Admins can now have better control over the process by establishing the rules to abide by.
4. Reduction in Costs (Increase in ROI)
Automating repetitive processes such as approvals saves you a significant amount of time every single day. Time is an asset for any organization, considering the additional expenses incurred every time important decisions fall prey to slow execution. When the end-to-end approval cycle time is drastically reduced, you are cutting down your overall organizational spending and costs.
Redundant processes like document approvals and invoice approvals can be simplified by configuring automatic routing from one level of approval to another. Any level of approval task automation thus links back to a positive impact on your ROI.
5. Improve Audit Readiness
Particularly for approval management, there are some parameters that need to be captured for every decision being made:
– Who made the decision
– What are the factors that led to the approval or rejection
– When was the decision taken
If not recorded during the process flow, the process of auditing the key results and their influencing factors will become complicated. Approval workflow captures the entire process down to the granular details in the form of in-built audit-trails, making the process audit-ready now and whenever you want to revisit.
6. Decrease in Errors
Workflows interface provides an intuitive way in which all processes are configured and governed. In a manual approval environment, agents and employees are in a need to remember processes or refer to process documents. Naturally, there is an increased chance of errors and missed events. If automated, the agent can keep track of the events with information captured within the tool and take the necessary actions.
You can configure your workflow to monitor pre-set checkboxes to sign-off approval requests, change approval status, manage pending approvals, and much more. With real-time triggers and email notifications, automation ensures no time is lost when a situation needs attention or when a new item is added.
7. Actionable Data Resulting From Standardized Processes
As multiple levels of approvals can occur day in and day out, it is generally hard to track the stages or bottlenecks present. Approval workflows act as a database of the decisions being made and every parameter that contributed to the end result. From areas of bottlenecks to the number of times the process got automated to money saved, the data from workflow automation can help you gain insights necessary for you to optimize and streamline your business processes further.
8. Improved Work Culture
Mundanity in everyday work can bring down the morale of employees by a great deal. Employees will be generally more satisfied and productive with a system that enables them to focus their subject matter expertise and competency on tasks that genuinely require human expertise.
Takeaways
Approval automation can help you leverage your time and resources in the most efficient way possible. Set up HappyFox Workflows, a customizable automation tool that integrates easily into your business ecosystem and facilitates easy user adoption.
Learn how to set up approvals using HappyFox workflows for increased organizational efficiency!
