I need a $200 part to fix a machine that is down. It has been three days. That was a maintenance supervisor at a 75-person construction supplier, and he was not exaggerating.
His request needed a supervisor, a plant manager, and the controller — in that order, and only when each was at their desk. The machine sat idle for 62 hours.
What the approval matrix actually cost
We pulled 12 months of purchase orders. Of the 8,400 orders raised, 71% were under $500. Those orders consumed 58% of the plant manager’s approval time.
He was spending nearly three days a month approving bolts. That number changed his mind faster than any process theory. When I run ERP Consulting assessments, this approval chain is always the first place I look — it is the one nobody has questioned since 2016.
The three-tier rule that fixed it
- Under $500: the buyer approves alone. Recorded automatically, reviewed monthly by exception report.
- $500 to $10,000: one manager approval, with auto-approval after 24 hours of silence.
- Above $10,000: manager plus finance, with a required written reason.
The auto-approval caused the loudest argument. Six months later it had fired 340 times and produced two poor purchases worth $11,000. It saved roughly 200 manager-hours. You can decide for yourself which number matters more.
What to check before you loosen anything
- Pull the last 12 months of purchase orders and count them by value band.
- Find the band with the most orders but the least total spend. That is your bottleneck.
- Set the threshold there and replace daily approvals with a monthly exception report.
- Give the controller authority to reverse the change if the report shows abuse two months running.
Start with the data pull. One analyst, one afternoon, one spreadsheet sorted by amount. Most approval matrices were written years ago for a company that no longer exists.
The maintenance supervisor got his part in 40 minutes after this change. That is what useful ERP Consulting looks like on a shop floor: a machine running, not a signature collected.