Approvals moved out of email chains and into Teams.
Purchase and document approvals at this 140-person operations company ran on forwarded email threads — requests sat for days, and approvals got lost on vacation handovers. Nobody could say where anything stood.
Approval by forwarded email — and hope.
Every purchase and every document sign-off started the same way: an email with an attachment, forwarded up the chain until it reached someone who could say yes. Each forward spawned another copy of the document, another branch of the thread, and another inbox where the request could quietly die.
The failure modes were predictable. Requests sat for days waiting on whoever the thread had last been forwarded to. When an approver went on vacation, the approval went with them — handovers meant hunting through someone else's inbox for half-finished threads, and some requests were simply never seen again. Checking status meant scrolling the chain, guessing who had it, and asking around.
Worst of all, there was no record. When anyone asked who had approved a purchase, when, and against which version of the document, the answer lived somewhere in a mailbox — if it existed at all. For an operations business, that isn't an inconvenience; it's an accountability gap.
Approvals rebuilt as Teams-native flows.
We took the process out of inboxes entirely and rebuilt it where the team already works — so a request follows one path, and every step of that path is recorded.
Every approval starts as a structured form instead of a free-text email — what's being requested, who's asking, and the supporting document, captured up front. No more decoding a thread to work out what's actually being approved.
The document lives in SharePoint, and the request points to it. Approvers review the one real file — not whichever attachment happened to be on the latest forward.
Approvals land in the Teams activity feed, where approvers already spend their day. Approve or reject happens right there — no digging through an inbox, and nothing riding on a forwarded thread.
Who requested, who approved, when, and against which document — the full trail is logged automatically on every request, with nobody maintaining a spreadsheet on the side.
Where things stand now.
Approvals now live where the work happens — visible, actioned in the flow of the day, and recorded without anyone lifting a finger.
The service behind this project — and more like it.
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