Approval Workflow

Situation before deployment

A mid-sized company with 12 departments and 500 employees. Applications for internal approvals, purchases, expenses, and business trips were all handled on paper, going through multiple approvers—department managers, general managers, and accounting—for final sign-off.

Paper documents often sat on approvers' desks for several days, and applicants could not see where things were stuck. Urgent cases were handled by the applicant walking around and asking approvers face-to-face, and this in-person chasing was widespread.

Rejections were often communicated verbally or via memo, with no history to trace afterward. Even when applications were rejected repeatedly for the same reason, the lessons were not retained by the organization. This was also flagged in audits, and improvement was urgent.

Background and selection reasons

Three options were considered: a major workflow package, a generic SaaS tool, and building on NocodilySuite. The major package was expensive to customize to our varied approval routes, and the generic SaaS had weak delegated approval and rejection history features.

We chose NocodilySuite because features such as multi-step approval, delegated approval, and rejection history could be built in a short time, and we could configure workflows flexibly for each of the 12 departments. We also confirmed that history retention required for audits was supported as standard.

The PoC period was two months. After trying the purchase approval workflow in Accounting and General Affairs, we moved to full-scale deployment. Integration methods with existing email notifications and the attendance system were verified in parallel.

Deployment process

The overall project ran for four months. Months one and two were PoC and application template design, month three was building the approval workflow, rejection, and delegated approval features, and month four was phased rollout across the 12 departments, three at a time.

Application forms that differed by department were reorganized into common fields and department-specific fields. We introduced automatic routing based on amount thresholds, so low-value cases stopped at the department manager, while high-value cases automatically flowed up to the general manager and accounting.

We built in a mechanism to automatically transfer approval rights to a delegate when the approver is absent. On rejection, entering a reason was made mandatory, and full history was kept in a searchable form. The audit trail required for compliance is now in place.

Changes after deployment

Average approval time stabilized at 2.4 days, and the on-time approval rate reached 96%. Pending approvals were reduced by 70%, and month-end rush processing has decreased significantly.

Applicants can now see on-screen where things are stuck, and in-person chasing has nearly disappeared. Delegated approvals keep the flow moving even when approvers are absent, and overall business speed has improved.

All rejection history is now preserved, and the practice of proactively preventing rejections for the same reason has taken hold. Audit trails are also readily available, reducing audit effort.

Future Plans

In the next phase we plan to integrate with the expense settlement system, unifying approval through payment into a single workflow. We aim to further streamline accounting operations.