Written by: David Carneal – Digital Efficiency Consulting Group – DECG
Read Time: 3 min
When teams start improving a workflow, delays become suspicious very quickly. Approval? Remove it. Review? Automate it. Validation? Surely the system can handle that. The stopwatch comes out and suddenly every control looks guilty.
That is a dangerous way to optimize. Some steps are slow because they are badly designed. Others are slow because they are protecting money, inventory, quality, compliance, or customer commitments. Speed and efficiency are related, but they are not twins.
A control earns its place by managing risk
In the Westbridge story, an order triggered a credit review. Finance ultimately approved the shipment because the account was healthy and the commercial value justified moving forward. That did not prove the credit control was useless. It proved judgment was part of the workflow.
The useful question is not, Why do we have to wait for finance? It is, What risk is this review supposed to catch, and is the current rule catching it efficiently?
The warning sign is not the control. It is the pattern
If a control repeatedly sends healthy transactions into manual review and nearly every one is approved, the workflow is giving you evidence. Maybe the threshold is outdated. Maybe customer segmentation has changed. Maybe the control is still necessary but the routing rule needs refinement.
Likewise, if the control catches meaningful problems regularly, removing it to save ten minutes may be a very expensive victory lap.
Challenge the control without attacking it
- Purpose: What specific risk is this control designed to reduce?
- Evidence: How often does it catch a real issue?
- Cost: How much waiting, labor, rework, or customer delay does it create?
- Override rate: How often is the control bypassed or manually approved?
- Alternatives: Could the same risk be managed earlier, automatically, or only for higher-risk transactions?
- Ownership: Who is responsible for reviewing whether the rule is still appropriate?
Controls become inefficient when nobody revisits them
Many workflow rules were created for sensible reasons. A pricing approval may have followed a costly mistake. A credit threshold may have been set when the customer base looked very different. A second verification may have been added after a system conversion. Years later, the original context disappears but the step remains.
That is how approval debt accumulates. Each decision made sense when it was added, but the combined system becomes heavier and nobody is assigned to prune it.
The money question
A good control should reduce expected loss more than it costs to operate. You do not need a finance PhD and a seventeen-tab model to start. Estimate the labor and delay created by the control, then compare that cost with the frequency and severity of the problems it prevents.
If the math and evidence support the control, keep it and make it smoother. If they do not, redesign it. The objective is not fewer controls. It is better controls.
CTA: Pick one approval your team complains about. Do not remove it. First document the risk, the override rate, and the weekly labor cost. Then decide whether the control is protecting the business or merely commemorating an old problem.