Professional services
Digital process automation for the approvals sitting in inboxes
Workflow, routing and approvals that run on their own — so work stops waiting for somebody to notice an email, and exceptions reach a person deliberately rather than by chance.
The situation
Work waiting on somebody to look
Most delay in an office process is not work. It is waiting — for an email to be noticed, a form to be passed on, or a person to come back from leave.
- Approvals sitting in an inbox for days
- Forms emailed as attachments and re-typed at the other end
- No way to see where a request has got to
- Work stalled because one approver is away
- Escalation happening only when somebody complains
- No record of who approved what, or when
What it covers
What process automation covers
Digital forms and capture
Structured capture at the start, so the process does not begin with information that has to be chased.
Routing and approvals
Requests going to the right person automatically, with delegation for absence built in rather than improvised.
Rules and conditions
Thresholds, exceptions and escalation encoded, so the routine path needs no intervention.
Status and visibility
Where a request is, without asking. This removes chasing from the process as well as the delay.
System integration
Approved outcomes landing in finance, HR or operational systems rather than being rekeyed.
Audit trail
A record of who decided what and when, which is usually the reason the process existed in the first place.
How we work
How the work runs
Simplify before automating. A five-stage approval that could be two stages should become two stages first — automating five is faster, but still five.
Map and time it
Follow a real request end to end and measure where the time goes. It is nearly always waiting rather than working.
Simplify
Challenge the approvals. Some exist for a risk that no longer applies, or duplicate a check made elsewhere.
Automate
Build the routing, rules and integration for the routine path, with exceptions escalated to a person.
Measure
Compare elapsed time against the baseline. Elapsed time is the honest measure, not the number of steps automated.
Outcomes
What you are left with
- Requests moving without waiting for someone to notice an email
- Fewer approval stages, not just faster ones
- Absence handled by delegation rather than by stalling
- Status visible without anyone chasing
- Outcomes landing in the systems that need them, unretyped
- An audit trail produced automatically
Platforms and tooling
What we work with
Platforms
- Power Automate
- Azure Logic Apps
- SharePoint
- Camunda
- Custom workflow
Systems
- Dynamics
- Salesforce
- SAP
- Sage
- Xero
- HR systems
Capture
- Digital forms
- Document processing
- E-signature
- Email ingestion
Named as platforms we work with, not as formal partnerships.
Common questions
Questions we are usually asked
You automate everything around it — the capture, the routing, the record, the follow-through — and leave the judgement with a person. The saving is in removing the waiting and the administration, not in removing the decision.
Not always. If you already run Microsoft 365, Power Automate may cover a great deal at no additional licence cost. A dedicated platform earns its place when you have many complex processes rather than a few simple ones.
Delegation and timeout rules are part of the design. This is worth deciding deliberately, because in most manual processes absence is handled by the request simply stopping until somebody notices.
It should not, if it is built to be changed by the people who own the process. Automation that requires a developer for every threshold change becomes a bottleneck of its own.
Elapsed time from request to outcome, measured before and after. Counting automated steps flatters the project; elapsed time is what the requester actually experiences.
Related but not the same. RPA drives existing user interfaces and is a reasonable last resort where no API exists. Where systems can be integrated properly, that is more robust — screen-driven automation breaks whenever a screen changes.
Talk to someone who has built this
Not a salesperson working from a form. Tell us what the problem looks like and someone who has delivered this kind of work will come back to you, usually within one working day.
Book a free consultationRelated
Where this usually connects
- Business automationTaking the repetitive administration out of a process.
- Systems integrationMaking the systems you already own talk to each other.
- Operational systemsThe systems that run the day-to-day work of the business.
- Business analysisMapping how the work actually runs before anything is built.
- Change managementGetting a new system actually adopted rather than merely delivered.
- Enterprise service busA single integration layer instead of point-to-point connections.