So this COO tells me about their quarterly efficiency review. He’s going through all their workflows with his team, and they get to this one approval process. He just looks at me and says: “We have a 3-day approval process for something that should take 30 minutes. I know it’s stupid, but I can’t figure out how to fix it without breaking everything.”
I started laughing, then realized he was serious.
That conversation stuck with me because honestly? This isn’t about one broken process. This is about the fear of touching anything that kind of works, even when everyone knows it’s inefficient.
How We Get Here (And It’s Not Stupidity)
These processes don’t start stupid. They start as necessary safeguards.
Someone made a mistake. Maybe a bad vendor got approved, or an expense got paid that shouldn’t have, or content went live with errors that embarrassed the company. So leadership added a checkpoint. Then another. Then a review step. Then a backup approval “just in case.”
Each step made sense when it was added. But nobody ever goes back and asks: “Do we still need all these steps?”
I see this everywhere. A process that made sense for 10 people doesn’t make sense for 50. A safeguard that was critical when the company was fragile becomes ridiculous when the company is stable.
I’ve seen companies that needed 5 signatures to change a typo on their website. Five. Signatures. For a typo.
The original reasoning was probably sound – website content represents the brand, errors are costly, multiple eyes catch mistakes. But somewhere along the way, “be careful” became “be paralyzed.”
What Actually Happens in Practice
Let me give you a real example I’ve pieced together from similar conversations with different operations people over time. This vendor approval process required:
Day 1: Department head submits vendor request with justification Day 2: Finance reviews budget impact and pricing Day 3: Legal reviews contract terms Day 4: Operations approves the workflow integration Day 5: COO signs off on strategic fit
Sounds reasonable, right? Thorough, careful, responsible.
Here’s what actually happened: The department head would submit a request to replace their broken printer. Finance would spend 2 hours analyzing the budget impact of a $300 printer. Legal would review the standard warranty terms they’d seen 50 times. Operations would confirm that yes, plugging in a printer won’t break their systems. The COO would sign off on the strategic importance of… having a working printer.
Meanwhile, the team was either not working or driving 20 minutes to print at FedEx.
The total cost of the approval process was about $800 in internal time. For a $300 printer. That needed to be replaced regardless.
The Fear Factor (Why Smart People Keep Dumb Processes)
Here’s what really gets me: everyone knows it’s broken, but nobody wants to be the one who breaks it more.
I asked that COO: “What’s the worst thing that could happen if you cut this to 1 day?” He couldn’t give me a specific answer. It was just “Well, we might miss something important.”
This is the fear that keeps inefficient processes alive. Not the fear of specific bad outcomes, but the general fear of responsibility if something goes wrong after you simplified a process.
I get it. The last time someone tried to streamline vendor approvals, they accidentally approved a supplier who couldn’t deliver on time. That project was delayed by 3 weeks. Everyone remembered that failure.
What they didn’t calculate was the cost of the current process: dozens of small delays, frustrated teams, competitive disadvantage from slow decision-making. The cumulative cost of the 3-day approval process was probably 10x higher than the cost of that one vendor mistake.
But slow failure is invisible. Fast failure is memorable.
The AI Solution (Intelligent Automation, Not Elimination)
AI would probably work here, but not by removing approvals – by making them instant for the obvious stuff.
Most approval processes follow predictable patterns. Low-dollar amounts, standard vendors, routine purchases – these don’t need human review. They need automated checking against predefined criteria.
We built something for a similar situation that analyzed every vendor request and automatically categorized it:
Green Zone: Standard purchases under $1,000 from approved vendor categories. Auto-approved within 2 hours.
Yellow Zone: Medium complexity or dollar amounts. Smart routing to the right approver based on type. Same-day turnaround.
Red Zone: High dollar amounts, new vendor types, or complex contracts. Full human review with all the original checkpoints.
The result? 80% of vendor requests went from 3 days to same-day approval. The other 20% still got the full review they actually needed.
But here’s the key: we didn’t eliminate oversight. We eliminated unnecessary waiting.
The Implementation Reality Check
It’s not gonna eliminate all bureaucracy. Some oversight is actually necessary.
The 80/20 rule applies here: you can automate the obvious decisions and keep humans for the complex ones. The $300 printer doesn’t need the same approval process as the $50,000 software license.
Some companies swing too far the other direction and eliminate all controls. That’s equally dangerous. I’ve seen companies approve bad vendors, overspend budgets, and create compliance problems because they removed all checkpoints.
The smart approach is risk-based approval: low-risk decisions get automated, high-risk decisions get human attention.
Also, change management is real. The people who built the original process had good reasons. If you don’t address their concerns, they’ll just create new checkpoints to replace the ones you removed.
What This Actually Looks Like
Let me show you a typical before and after from this type of implementation:
Before: Average vendor approval took 5 business days. Required 4 different people to review every request. Total internal cost per approval: about $400 in time.
After: 80% of requests approved same day. 15% approved next day. 5% still take the full review process. Average internal cost per approval: about $50.
Same level of oversight for the stuff that matters. 8x faster for routine decisions.
The unexpected benefit? Their team started making better purchasing decisions because they could move quickly when good opportunities came up. Instead of stockpiling supplies “just in case,” they could order what they needed when they needed it.
The Process Audit Every COO Needs
One take is: if you can’t explain why a process takes 3 days, it probably doesn’t need to.
Here’s the conversation worth having with your team: “What would happen if we cut this approval time in half?” Not “should we eliminate approvals,” but “what’s the real risk vs. the opportunity cost?”
Most teams can immediately identify the steps that add time without adding value. The challenge is having permission to remove them.
Start with the most obviously ridiculous ones. Map the actual workflow, not the theoretical one. Time how long each step actually takes vs. how long people wait between steps.
I usually find that the “3-day approval process” is actually a “30-minute decision process with 2.5 days of waiting for people to look at their email.”
The fix isn’t always AI or automation. Sometimes it’s just asking people to prioritize approvals or setting expectations about response times.
The Competitive Reality
Meanwhile, your competitors are moving at 10x speed because they figured out how to be careful without being slow.
I was working with another client who was losing deals because their contract approval process took 2 weeks. Their main competitor was closing similar deals in 3 days. Same industry, same risk profile, same contract complexity.
The difference? The competitor had automated the routine contract reviews and reserved human attention for the genuinely complex negotiations.
When speed becomes a competitive advantage, slow approval processes aren’t just inefficient – they’re expensive.
The Question That Changes Everything
The simple question every COO should ask about any approval process: “What would we do if we had to make this decision in 1 hour?”
Not “how do we eliminate this decision,” but “how do we make it quickly and safely?”
Most of the time, the answer involves having clear criteria, trusted people, and automated checks for the routine stuff. The same rigor, less waiting.
But yeah, 3 days for a 30-minute decision… that’s not process improvement, that’s process archaeology.
Curious about what your approval processes actually cost in time and opportunity? The numbers might surprise you.