Approval is part of many processes and is sometimes called a subprocess. It can be fairly common in some business environments, particularly those in highly regulated industries. As such, approvals are often subject to the same continuous improvement process that other processes are held to.
To properly improve, organizations can leverage the critical measurements taken out of approval system(s). These may be reviewed via dashboards, graphical reports, or spreadsheet style data exports. Having these items automatically generated for review prevents someone from having to take additional initiative to look at the data that will drive improvement.
Example approval measurements include:
- Volume
- Approval notes
- Assignment
- Duration
- Individual inspection
That last one is particularly challenging, and sometimes may not be achievable due to a high volume of records to review. Individually inspecting each and every record and request may not be possible, for teams with high volumes, removing the approval step and performing random audits for mistakes and missteps can save a great deal of time and effort.
Each of these example reports highlight opportunities for improvement as well as helping participants and process engineers understand the lifecycle of an approval. From reading the rejection and approval notes to seeing a graph of approval durations, these measurements shine light on an important sub-process.
Approval Essentials is an in-depth article with many more intricacies of approval explored. If you’re a leader, process engineer, designer, or application developer you have no doubt dealt with approvals. We would love to hear your stories, tips and challenges. Please ask Wally@KineticData.com a question. Finally, to read more about the technology we use to solve these challenges check out The Kinetic Platform.
Cassy Lueneburg