Waiting for Approval
In many companies, the approval process then follows two paths: technical and financial, with expensive or unusual items moving up a chain of multiple sign-offs, often with long delays and many explanatory phone calls. I recently worked with a financial services company that was examining its procurement process and that had seven layers of sign-offs for approval of items over $500 for both the technical and the financial sides. The average time for approval for high-cost items was three weeks, but could easily run into months.