A purchasing manager at a mid-sized manufacturing company needs sign-off on a raw material order. The general manager is at the factory today and visiting a client tomorrow. An e-mail was sent, the secretary was called, a fax was dispatched. Three days later, when the approval finally comes through, the supplier has revised the price and the delivery date has slipped. This kind of delay is a routine experience in many Turkish SMEs. Approval workflows are well-intentioned control mechanisms, but every day a manager is away from the office, that mechanism turns into a bottleneck.
A mobile approval system is designed to break that bottleneck. The core idea is straightforward: approval requests are routed to the manager’s mobile phone via SMS or corporate e-mail, and the manager responds through the same channel. The manager does not need to be at a computer. A short SMS reply from a Nokia handset, or a quick response through the mobile access feature of the corporate e-mail system, is enough to complete the approval. The ERP or accounting software then records the decision and the process moves forward.
The technical infrastructure for this approach can be set up in two different ways. The first is SMS-based: an approval request is sent to the manager’s phone in a defined format, and the manager replies with a pre-assigned code. The second is e-mail-based: the corporate mail server is configured for mobile access, and the manager reads and replies to the request from the phone. In both cases, the critical requirement is that the manager’s response is automatically recorded in the corporate system; otherwise the phone reply simply disappears without a trace.
To put the cost of waiting in concrete terms, consider a straightforward calculation: a purchase request that sits for an average of two days delays the delivery of that order by two days. If the production line depends on that material, the two-day delay translates directly into idle labor and machine downtime costs. For leave approvals, the lag hits employee satisfaction; unplanned absences are a predictable consequence of slow approval systems. For expense approvals, a delayed sign-off can push a payment past its due date and damage the supplier relationship. Taken together, these delays add up to a loss that may seem difficult to quantify but is in fact quite real.
The most visible benefit of mobile approval is speed. Even when the manager is in a morning meeting or an afternoon client visit, an incoming request can be reviewed and answered within minutes. In practice, this means cutting average approval waiting times from two or three days down to a few hours. The second benefit is traceability: the system logs which request was sent to whom, at what time, and when it was answered. That record has value for internal auditing and also makes it easy to identify where bottlenecks consistently form. The third benefit is that it helps managers handle their workload more steadily; instead of reviewing a stack of accumulated approvals at the end of the day, decisions can be made in real time throughout the day.
That said, putting this system into practice involves real challenges. First, the corporate e-mail server needs to be configured for mobile access, which means additional server-side setup and security measures. SMS-based solutions require custom integration with the ERP software, and not every ERP vendor offers this out of the box. The manager’s handset also needs to support e-mail access, and it cannot be assumed that all managers carry a device capable of this. Perhaps most importantly, companies where approval authority is not clearly defined will only accelerate confusion with this system; the authority matrix needs to be sorted out before any mobile layer is added on top.
An SME manager considering a mobile approval system should start by counting the actual bottlenecks in the company: how many purchase requests, leave forms, and expense approvals are waiting each week, and what is the average time each one sits before a decision is made? If those numbers are clear and the cost of delay is visible, comparing it against the setup cost becomes straightforward. If a corporate e-mail infrastructure is already in place, the additional investment is modest; if it is not, building the e-mail system first is the more sensible starting point. In short, this decision should come from the need to solve a concrete process problem, not from an interest in the technology itself.
This article was originally written in Turkish by Gökhan MERCANOĞLU on July 2, 2007 and has been automatically translated into English and other languages using machine translation.