Approval Workflows: From Days of Email Chasing to Same-Day Decisions

A department head at a clinic group in Amman needs a replacement ultrasound probe, and her purchase request passes through three inboxes over five working days before anyone signs it. The decision itself took perhaps ten minutes of real thinking.

The path is familiar. She scans the form and emails it to the operations manager, who is at another branch and forwards it to finance on Tuesday. Finance asks for a second quotation on Wednesday, and the general manager signs on Sunday.

Email-based approval workflows like this one repeat across purchasing, leave, discounts, refunds, credit limits and payments. Most of the delay comes from requests sitting in inboxes, waiting for someone to notice them.

Where the days actually go

If you trace a dozen recent approvals from request to final decision, the time usually splits into the same few buckets:

• Waiting in an inbox. The request arrives among two hundred other emails and is not seen until the approver searches for it, often after a reminder call.
• Missing information. The approver cannot decide because a quotation, budget code or justification is missing, so the request goes back and the clock restarts.
• Unclear routing. Nobody is sure whether a request of this size needs the general manager, so it goes to everyone just in case.
• Absence with no cover. The approver is travelling or on leave and nobody has authority to act in their place.
• Re-keying after approval. Once signed, someone still has to type the details into the ERP (enterprise resource planning) system to create the purchase order, which adds another delay and another chance of error.

None of these delays involves the decision itself, and all of them can be fixed with clearer rules and a modest amount of automation.

Design the rules before you build anything

A workflow tool can only follow rules that exist, and most email-based approval processes have never written theirs down. Before choosing a tool, agree on four things in writing.

Thresholds and routing

Define who approves what, by value and type. For example, purchases up to 500 dinars need the department head only, purchases up to 5,000 dinars add the operations manager, and anything above adds the general manager. Capital items or new suppliers may follow a different path. Write it as a simple table that anyone can read.

Required information

List what a request must contain before it can be submitted: description, quantity, estimated cost, budget line, supplier, quotations above a set value, and a short reason. If the form will not submit without these, the back-and-forth disappears.

Response time targets

Agree how long each approver has. Same working day is a reasonable target for most routine approvals. Without a target, there is no basis for a reminder or escalation.

Delegation and escalation

Every approver needs a named delegate for absences, and every request needs a rule for what happens if the deadline passes. A common approach is an automatic reminder after a set number of hours, then escalation to the approver’s manager or delegate.

Building the automated workflow step by step

With the rules agreed, the build is usually the easier part. A typical sequence looks like this:

1. Replace the paper or email form with a structured one. Use a form inside your ERP if it has an approval module, or a separate form tool. Make the key fields mandatory and use dropdowns for budget lines and departments.
2. Route automatically by the rules. The workflow reads the value and category and sends the request to the right approver, without anyone forwarding it.
3. Let approvers decide where they are. A notification with approve and reject buttons, usable from a phone, removes most of the waiting time. Approvers should see all the information they need in the notification or one click away.
4. Add reminders and escalation. Send a reminder when the target time approaches, and escalate when it passes.
5. Connect the outcome to the system of record. Once approved, the workflow should create the purchase order, update the leave balance or post the credit limit change, without retyping.
6. Keep a full audit trail. Record who approved, when, and any comments. This makes internal and external audits far simpler than chasing signed paper.

Many organisations already own tools that can do this. ERP systems such as Odoo, SAP Business One and Microsoft Dynamics include approval features of varying depth, and workflow tools such as Power Automate or n8n can fill the gaps or connect systems that do not talk to each other. The right choice depends on where your data lives and who will maintain the workflow.

Measuring whether it worked

Track a small number of measures from the first week: average time from request to final decision, the share of requests returned for missing information, and the number of escalations. For the clinic group, a realistic goal would be to move routine purchase requests from several days to the same day, while keeping full control over spending.

Review the data after a month. If one approver causes most escalations, that is a conversation about workload or delegation, not a technology issue. If many requests are returned, the form needs another mandatory field.

Keep paper or email as a fallback only for genuine system outages, and say so clearly. If people learn that an urgent request still gets approved faster by calling the general manager directly, the old habits will return and the workflow will carry only the easy cases.

Faster approvals without losing control

Start with the approval that causes the most chasing today, often purchase requests. Agree its thresholds, mandatory fields and response target on one page, run it for a month, and use the measures above to decide which approval to move next.

Our Intelligent Automation service covers exactly this: agreeing the approval rules, building the workflow in the tools you already own where possible, and measuring the results so you can see the difference.