How to Reduce Operational Bottlenecks in Your Company's Approvals?

Reducing operational bottlenecks in your company's approvals starts by identifying exactly which step each request stalls at, so you can automate by trigger whatever is repetitive and simplify whatever still depends on human decision.

Every bottleneck has a concrete cause, even when it seems vague. Sometimes it's a single overloaded approver. Other times it's the lack of a clear rule about who decides what. The common mistake is trying to fix this with more people, when the problem is in how the process is designed.

Without visibility into where the process stalls, leadership only sees the symptom: complaints about delays, vendors chasing status, a stalled project. Without knowing the exact cause, any attempted fix becomes trial and error.

Where bottlenecks tend to form

  • A single person concentrating decisions from several areas at once
  • No automatic rule to escalate a request when the approver doesn't respond
  • Incomplete requests going back and forth between requester and approver
  • No single dashboard showing the status of everything pending
  • Different processes for the same type of request across different areas of the company

How to identify the real cause of the bottleneck

  • Measure the average time of each step, not just the total process time
  • Find out how many requests pass through the same person before moving forward
  • Check whether there's a backup rule when the approver is unavailable
  • Check how many requests get sent back for being incomplete or poorly filled out

Concrete actions to reduce the identified bottlenecks

  • Automate low-value, low-risk approvals by trigger
  • Redistribute the alçada across more than one person, when volume justifies it
  • Standardize required request fields, avoiding back-and-forth
  • Create an automatic backup rule so absences don't stall the process

In Jestor, these trigger and backup rules stay visible in a single dashboard, without relying on parallel control spreadsheets.

How Jestor supports bottleneck reduction

  • Jestor allows automation by button or event trigger, without code
  • Jestor's execution log shows in real time where each request is stalled
  • Clients report around a 35% increase in operational efficiency after standardizing flows in Jestor
  • Flows with hierarchy and alçada by value keep small decisions from reaching leadership

Frequently asked questions

What's the first step to reducing an approval bottleneck? Measuring the time of each step separately to find out where the process is really stalling.

Does automating alone solve the bottleneck? It helps a lot, but Jestor also recommends reviewing how the alçada is distributed among people.

Does an approval bottleneck mean there's a problem with the ERP? Not necessarily. The bottleneck is usually in the process around the ERP, not the system itself.

Reducing operational bottlenecks in your company's approvals requires measuring where the process stalls, redistributing the alçada, and automating what's repetitive, without relying on more people to handle the volume.

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With Jestor, you can automate workflows, connect departments, and build internal systems your way, all without code and with AI support. Get to know Jestor at jestor.com and discover how to take your company's management to a new level of efficiency and integration.

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