Authorization requests are a fact of life in most businesses, and there are many different kinds. Authorizations may be requested for purchasing equipment, requesting paid time off, or reserving a fleet vehicle, for example. Authorization request processes may have different details, but they generally include similar steps: someone requests for something to be authorized, someone with approving authority considers the request, and then grants or denies it.
When the authorization request process is byzantine or includes several manual steps like filling out a paper form and handing it to someone, it has many chances to become bogged down and saddles your personnel with a lot of busywork that's not adding to the company bottom line. Fortunately, there are some easy ways to improve the authorization request process. Here are 6 tips for doing that. 1. Be Honest About Shortcomings of Your Current Authorization Request Process Think about when your company first came up with the current request authorization process for, say, requesting paid time off. Maybe then the company only had five or six people, and you could simply ask if anyone had conflicts around the time someone wanted to take vacation. Later, perhaps you came up with a paper form for doing this, so you would have documentation as your company grew. But now, handling those paper forms takes up an inordinate amount of time. There has to be a better way. 2. Map Out Your "Ideal" Authorization Request Process Typically, your ideal request process includes an employee making a request over the company network, the approving authorities immediately knowing a request has been made, and delivery of their approval or denial takes place over the network promptly. There's no paper to keep up with, and the whole process takes place a lot faster. Perhaps approved requests would automatically deliver relevant data to other systems. Say someone's approved request for a fleet vehicle could automatically enter the requester's employee information into the transportation manager's database. 3. Determine the Differences Between Your Existing and Ideal Process What are the differences between your current authorization request process and the perfect process you envision? Does it involve fewer people and less busywork? Does it integrate important data across departments? Does it take a week-long process and whittle it down to a day? Evaluate why your ideal process is better and write down what you discover. How can the clunky, inefficient steps of today's process be simplified, accelerated, and improved through technology or by eliminating unnecessary steps?
