Manager approvals can be a real pain – you’re at your desk, trying to remember multiple passwords (SAP, Oracle, Workday, etc.), and you never have all the information you need. So, you put it off despite the fact that your direct reports, finance, and HR are hounding you for being the bottleneck.
This blog drives home the importance of approvals in a workplace and how a good mobile solution can be a gamechanger in making your approval process simpler, enabling an efficient, productive and a highly satisfied workforce.
A typical manager works 50 hours a week, dedicating over 15 hours to administrative tasks and rubber-stamping requests. They need quick decisions to move on with their day, avoiding clunky approval processes.
We are all aware that approvals are put in place to serve as a company's checks and balances, but since the process is so tedious, managers get frustrated when they are expected to complete them.
In addition, approvals involve more than just compliance and controls. Executing crucial business processes, such as promptly accepting a sales discount to gain a customer's business, expense reports for end-of-quarter reporting, or a purchase requisition essential for a quick time to market, might sometimes be criticized by some. A clunky approvals process that doesn’t move at the pace of the business creates a real operational lag and can impact a competitive advantage.
Think of how much frustration you’d avoid. And how happy your teammates and direct reports would be if you could fulfill their requests quickly.
Automate mobile approvals and reduce compliance risks.
Factors causing the problem include employees' workload, errors, and accountability. If your team spends its days asking for permission before executing, taking an hour to complete expense reports or time sheets, attending redundant meetings, or answering irrelevant emails, you’ve got a problem.
Most ERP-based approval processes are engineered with a lowest-common-denominator approach. They tend to expose all the fields and steps that might be required for the most complex approval, even though most approvals don’t require that many steps or nearly that much information.
There are easy ways to adapt approval workflows with a “minimalist” approach, displaying just the necessary information and steps, depending on the type of approval.
Large organizations often have multiple back-office applications for various approvals, such as expenses, timesheets, purchase orders, and credit memos. To streamline approval processes, businesses could provide a single integrated queue of approvals, similar to a "unified inbox" concept. This would eliminate the need for separate passwords and account information, allowing users to process all approvals in one place, reducing the complexity and nuances of each application.
Automated email-based approvals are a partial solution, but they can clutter busy managers' mailboxes and cause Finance to question if approvals were properly reviewed. "Flat" emails and system differences can create workflow bottlenecks, and cluttered inboxes do little to improve efficiency.
Business moves quickly, and critical approval processes need to be accessible on mobile devices. Managers don't want to have to access systems on laptops, networks, or VPNs. By making these processes available on mobile devices, time-consuming steps are eliminated. Managers can approve or deny approvals with a quick swipe, leveraging push notifications.
Decision-support information – Approve or reject a request is available.
Approval processes are essential to every aspect of your organization, assisting in the governance of processes in finance, sales, operations, and human resources. We identified approvals as a recurrent difficulty in all businesses, regardless of size or industry. And we set out to provide a solution that allows time spent on administration to be re-invested in activities that will assist the organization achieve its goals. By enabling mobile approvals, make your organization more agile and your users happier, while ensuring that finance has the visibility and control needed to support the organization. Request a Demo for your Mobile Approvals solution.
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