Approval mechanisms

Companies require approval mechanisms and strategies for a variety of reasons, mainly to ensure effective decision-making, maintain consistency, manage risks, and align with their goals and values. Here are some key reasons why companies implement approval strategies:

1. Control and Oversight - Approval strategies provide a structured process for reviewing and approving decisions. This control ensures that important decisions are not made haphazardly or without proper consideration. By establishing clear approval hierarchies, companies can prevent errors, oversights, or actions that might be detrimental to the organization.
2. Risk Management - Certain decisions can carry significant risks, whether financial, legal, reputational, or operational. An approval strategy helps assess and mitigate these risks by involving relevant stakeholders who can provide expertise and insights to ensure the decision aligns with the company's risk tolerance and compliance standards.
3. Consistency - Companies often aim to maintain consistency in their operations, branding, and messaging. Approval strategies help ensure that decisions are aligned with established guidelines and standards. This consistency is crucial for maintaining a strong brand image and delivering a unified experience to customers, partners, and employees.
4. Resource Allocation - Decisions related to resource allocation, budgeting, and expenditures can impact the company's financial health. An approval strategy helps ensure that resources are allocated wisely, optimizing the company's financial performance and preventing wastage.
5. Alignment with Goals - Companies have specific objectives, mission statements, and strategic goals. Approval strategies help ensure that decisions made at various levels of the organization are aligned with these broader goals, contributing to the company's overall success.
6. Regulatory and Legal Compliance - Many industries are subject to strict regulations and legal requirements. An approval strategy helps ensure that decisions and actions taken by the company adhere to these regulations. This can help prevent legal issues, fines, or other negative consequences that may arise from non-compliance.

Purchase or internal order approvals

Before the processing of a customer order or internal order may start, each order needs to fulfll three approval criteria:

• Financial approval - Depending on predefined financial approval strategies, different parties need to approve the order
• Material approval - Special product groups require a product group manager to approve the order before it is granted (e.g. shotguns)
• Team manager approval - when staff is ordering through the team ordering assistant, you may define that team managers have to approve each or specific orders.
• Team leader approval - If defined, personal equipment ordering assistant may permit the violation of organizational rules, but then requires the authorization of a team leader.

Material approval

If companies handle goods, which have regulations for special access (drugs, weapons, very valuable items, ... ) companies can impose material approval mechanisms based on product classification groups, which enforces an approval mechanism before these items can be ordered. ZUGSEIL comes with the Material approval strategy administation app, which allows definition of multiple approval process templates for material approval

Personal equipment approval

ZUGSEIL allows over several mechanism to govern the personal equipment process over its product. PEM introduces two types of approval

• Team leader approval - when staff is ordering through the personal equipment ordering assistant, team leaders may be required to override certain restrictions and rules

Related articles

• App:Approval strategies administration - This app allows approval strategies, which can be bound to many approval govering objects
• App:Pending order tasks - This app allows responsible persons to grant or reject approvals
• Dev:Approval agent - The central service, which governs the approval process depending on the settings made in the applicable approval strategy.