3 Tips to Streamline Complex Approval Processes

Let’s imagine that you and your team have been working for months to write several press releases and blog posts to promote your company’s new product.

You spent weeks gathering information from the Product and Marketing teams. When the draft is finally ready for review, you track down the appropriate stakeholders to review and approve it before publishing.

As the review process is in progress, you start getting feedback from other teams. With other projects going on simultaneously, you lose track of edits and the latest version of the press release. At this point, you are making last-minute changes, missing deadlines, and contemplating delaying the launch date.

Without an approval process in place, all the hard work and energy that went into this project is wasted.

Avoid Delays and Errors

Approval processes can get messy, but there are ways to streamline them to achieve success.

At the quick pace of modern businesses, organizations increasingly depend on process automation to deploy standardized approval processes and minimize room for error. Leveraging automation, you and your team can automatically request edits from the appropriate stakeholder, track changes, set up reminders, and avoid bottlenecks. All of this increases the efficiency of responses and ensures that deadlines are met.

Below are some tips to keep in mind when designing a complex approval process that involves multiple stakeholders:

1.  Outline each step of the approval process and stick to it

Who are the key stakeholders? What are their tasks? What exactly is needed to complete the approval process? If the steps are clearly defined, there is less time spent on debating the process and more time spent on executing it.

In Nintex Workflow Cloud, you can build state machines to automate the approval process, while still accommodating multiple reviewers and outcomes. Depending on whether a draft is rejected or approved, you can pre-determine what the next step should be and who is responsible for it.

2.  Communication is imperative

However, it’s a cumbersome process to continue pinging or emailing multiple stakeholders to remind them of a task they are assigned to complete.

With the ‘Assign a task’ action in Nintex Workflow Cloud, you can avoid missing deadlines by setting up notifications for tasks and responses. It also allows you to configure reminders and escalations if deadlines are missed.

3.  Leverage the cloud

Sifting through email threads to track approvals and edits is not the most productive way to spend your time. Instead, utilize a cloud storage solution to manage and organize your content and link to the appropriate version in your notifications.

By leveraging Nintex Connectors, you can connect to content repositories such as Google Drive, OneDrive for Business, Box, and Dropbox, and dynamically store file locations of the latest draft version.

Don’t let a complex approval process ruin the hard work you and your team put into each project. Take advantage of capabilities and tools like state machines, automated reminders and tasks, and a connected content repository to automate and streamline approvals.

To learn how to do this with Nintex Workflow Cloud, enroll in the course at Customer Learning Central.