Procurement approvals reduced from days to hours

Every purchase, from £50 of stationery to £250,000 of plant, followed the same four-step approval chain. Average approval time was 4.5 working days, most of it queue time.

We modelled the decision each approval step actually made, then routed by value, category and requester history. Low-risk requests now auto-approve with post-hoc sampling; high-value requests keep the full chain and gain automatic escalation.

Approval events fell by 74%. Average approval time went from 4.5 days to 6 hours. The control environment was reviewed and signed off by internal audit before launch.