WHAT IS THE NEED FOR MOBILE APP APPROVALS?
Manager approvals suck – you’re at your desk, trying to remember multiple passwords (SAP, Oracle, Workday, etc.), and never have all the information you need. So, you put it off and your direct reports, finance, and HR are hounding you for being the bottleneck.
A typical manager works for 50 hours a week and spends more than 15 of those hours rubber-stamping requests and performing other administrative tasks.
Clearly, managers don’t have time for clunky approval processes. They need to make decisions swiftly and get on with their day.
Then why do we make them waste valuable time on administrative tasks?
we all know approvals are put in place to serve as the checks and balances for a company, the process of doing them is so painful that managers get frustrated when they have to do them.
Of course, approvals aren’t just a matter of compliance and controls. Some are actually critical to executing important business processes – approving a sales discount quickly to win a customer’s business, expense reports for end of quarter reporting, or a purchase requisition needed for expedient time to market. A clunky approvals process that doesn’t move at the pace of the business creates real operational drag and can impact a competitive advantage.
What if approvals were as easy as tapping “Yes” “No” or “Need more info” on your smartphone? Think of how much frustration you’d avoid. And how happy your teammates and direct reports would be that you could fulfill their requests quickly.
1)Drowning in Approvals – how big a problem approvals are for Companies
a) Time Intensiveness
Expense reports: 50% of companies use manual systems (spreadsheets or pen and paper) for approving expense reports5. 38% say their biggest pain point is the time it takes to reconcile, review, and approve expenses5
Purchase orders: 53% of businesses use email for approving purchase orders6. 50% of finance workers are unhappy with their company’s purchase order process.
b) Compliance Risk
Automate mobile approvals and reduce compliance risks. Here are the 5 Compliance benefits enterprises get by going mobile.
c) Employee Dissatisfaction
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. And, these are the factors that could be causing the problem. And while there the motivation to improve processes emanates from multiple levels in an organization, employees are typically most interested in finding ways to improve processes because they are in the trenches. They are handling the majority of the workload, correcting errors, and are held accountable when bottlenecks occur. They would rather work efficiently but it’s hard to stay motivated when frustrating processes dominate their day.
2) Infographic -Why approvals waste time? What factors are causing or magnifying the problem?
The business applications that power your approvals processes are extremely complex and difficult to access, introducing significant delays in each process.
- Business processes are inefficient
- Too many people are involved
- They’re using the wrong tools
- They’re using the wrong tools
3) Possible Solutions
Tip #1 – Simplify the Workflows
Most ERP-based approval processes are engineered with a lowest-common-denominator approach. They tend to expose all of 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.
Tip #2 – Consolidate the Approval Requests
Large organizations typically have multiple back office applications, whether from line of business specialty applications, or from mergers and acquisitions. These applications cover many forms of approvals – expenses, timesheets, purchase orders, purchase requisitions, credit memos, vacations, and more.
Instead of processing approvals from different systems via different processes, user interfaces and workflows, what if you could give your business users a single integrated queue of approvals so they could quickly and easily process them all in one place? It’s a bit like the “unified inbox” concept that many smartphones use – you don’t need to put in separate passwords or worry about which account a given email came from. It’s all in one place, shielding the users from the complexity and nuances of each of the individual applications.
Tip #3 – Automated email workflows
It’s worth noting that automated email-based approvals are only a partial solution. Email-based approvals will tend to clutter an already-cluttered mailbox for busy managers. Beyond that, the “flat” nature of emails and differences across systems can leave Finance wondering whether an approval was properly reviewed prior to approval. Emails seldom highlight critical business workflow tasks thereby creating workflow bottlenecks. Cluttered inboxes do little to improve efficiency.
Tip #4 – Leverage the Mobile Devices All Managers Have and Push Notification Functionality
Your business moves too fast to have critical approval processes waiting on PC-based access. And your managers don’t want to have to boot up their laptop, get on a network, log in to the VPN, and access and navigate a system to process an approval, especially when they’re on-the-go or outside of the office. By making all of your business-critical approval processes available on the mobile devices your managers carry at all times, you eliminate time-consuming steps. Plus, by leveraging push notifications, managers can approve – or deny – with a quick swipe, directly from their phone.
4) Benefits Of Mobile App Approvals
Decision-support information – Approve, reject a request is available.
a. A modern user experience
User-centric design principles. Only routinely used features are on the app and the navigation is simple and intuitive.
b. Convenient delivery
All of the details needed to approve a request is right there on any device, so there’s no need to search through multiple apps or systems.
c. Instant response
Approving a request is as easy as tapping your screen or clicking a button—no need to compose an email or customize your response.
d. Fewer emails
Cutting email out of the approval process means no more internal requests clogging up your inbox and obscuring client or company emails.
e. Less user error
With approval requests delivered via push notification and accessible through a Facebook-like feed, you won’t have to worry about missing a deadline or accidentally deleting or forgetting to respond to emails.
f. Minimal interruptions
Approval requests on the spot prevents from hijacking your meetings interrupting your day.
It’s important because of changing competitiveness. Business are increasingly acting on information from anywhere without being coupled to location. It helps companies remain in touch with customers, vendor and staff all the time.
g. No more bottlenecks
Fast approvals keep workflows humming along—and you’ll never have to slog through a backlog of app requests again.
5) CTA
Approvals processes are vital to every part of your business, helping to govern processes in Finance, Sales, Operations, and HR. we recognized approvals as a pervasive challenge across all companies, regardless of size and industry. And we set out to offer a solution that saves time spent in administration and allows it to be re-invested in activities that will help in moving the needle on the organization’s 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.
It’s important because of changing competitiveness. Business are increasingly acting on information from anywhere without being coupled to location. It helps companies remain in touch with customers, vendor and staff all the time. Get to know about the mobility steps that enterprises are planning towards in a report released by Enteprise Mobility Exchange.