A consultancy bidding and delivering projects across three offices approved project costs the way most professional firms do: an email and a signature scan. A pending approval could sit in a director’s inbox for a week while a quote expired. When a job’s costs overran, the discovery typically arrived with the client’s invoice. Reporting on job profitability meant an evening in a spreadsheet every month.
The difficulty
Three offices meant three approval habits, and formally one policy that nobody could evidence. Time-pressure made the informal path faster than the formal one, which is why the formal one was losing. Directors wanted control without becoming bottlenecks; project managers wanted speed without audits. Both distrusted workflow software for the same reason: they had seen it add steps rather than remove them.
Project snapshot
- SectorEngineering Consultancy
- Modules deployedInsight Reports, Insight Flow, Insight Mobile add-on
- Duration6 weeks, including one full approval cycle live in shadow
- Written up withClient permission; identifying detail removed
Numbers quoted in this study were measured by the client before and after the change — they are not our estimates. Where a figure could not be measured cleanly, it has been left out rather than rounded flatteringly.
What we changed
We mapped the real decision path first — not the policy document’s version — and rebuilt it in Insight Flow in one day: thresholds routing small approvals to project managers directly, larger ones to directors, with automatic reminders and named deputies for leave. The intake form captures the quote, the job code and the cost centre before approval can be requested, so a decision is possible on first read. Insight Reports then delivered a live job-cost dashboard and a Monday-morning margin pack, emailed on schedule. Approvals moved to the Insight Mobile add-on after the directors found the work list faster than their inbox.
The results
- Median approval time down from about a week to under an hour.
- Live job-cost visibility for all three offices — overruns surface in days, not at invoicing.
- One approval policy, evidenced by a decision log nobody has to maintain.
- Directors became approvers again: the queue is visible, the reminders are automatic.
The workflow automated the path approvals actually took. The intake form captures the information needed to decide, so the formal path became the fastest.
If your organisation looks like this one
Before automating approvals, map the path requests actually take, not the one in the policy document. Fix intake before routing: most approval delay is missing information, not missing signatures. Make the formal path faster than the informal one; a work list an approver can clear from a phone does more than a memo.
To see how a project like this would run against your own calendar and numbers, ask us for a written quote — Approvals projects are small and fast to pay back: most are quoted in a day and live within six weeks.