Agents take the routine steps and draft the paperwork. Named owners, deadlines and a tamper-evident history cover the rest.
Work does not usually stall because someone refused. It stalls because nobody owned it.
A request sits in an inbox, gets forwarded twice, and surfaces three weeks later when somebody asks. Agents take the steps that never needed a person, and the ones that do are named, timed and recorded.
Ready-made templates cover the common processes. Anything else is defined as its own set of stages, and a template can be retired and brought back later without disturbing the cases already running on it.
Incoming documents are read, the fields the stage requires are pulled out, and anything missing or contradictory is flagged. Whoever picks the case up gets a summary of it rather than a folder.
Each stage says who holds it and when it is due. Overdue work generates reminders on its own rather than waiting for somebody to notice, including on mobile.
At stages defined for it, an agent routes or decides and drafts the approval minutes, memos and letters straight from the case. Where a decision has to be human, a stage can require several named people to agree rather than any one of them.
Every action is recorded in a tamper-evident history, attributed to whoever or whatever took it. A case closed or rejected by mistake can be reopened without starting again, and cancelling or deleting one is itself recorded.
None of these are decision problems. In every case somebody would have approved it — the delay came from nobody knowing it was waiting.
The submission leaves the branch and then becomes invisible to the person who sent it. A defined route with a named owner at each stage means the branch can see where it is without telephoning to ask.
A request is forwarded once, the recipient is on leave, and nothing happens for three weeks. A deadline on the stage and an automatic reminder turn silence into a visible overdue item.
Someone asks who signed off a payment eighteen months ago and on what basis. The stages, the people on them, and the documents attached at each point are all recoverable from the case itself.
A vendor’s particulars get entered slightly differently on each request, and reconciling them later becomes its own job. A shared catalogue of people, vendors and assets means they are selected rather than retyped.
Only at a stage you defined for it. Agents act where you place them and nowhere else, so a decision you want a person to make stays with a person — and a stage can require several named people to agree rather than any one of them. The design assumption is that some steps never needed a human and some must always have one, and that you decide which is which.
The same way you know what a colleague did. Every action an agent takes is written to the same tamper-evident history, attributed to the agent and the stage it ran at, so reading a case back does not require knowing in advance which steps were automated. If an outcome has to be defended eighteen months later, the agent’s steps are in the record alongside everyone else’s.
No. The ready-made templates cover purchase requisitions, IT access requests, vendor payments, expense approvals and vehicle loans, so one of those can be running before anything bespoke is designed. Most organisations start with a single process and add others once they can see how the first one behaves.
Yes. A stage can require several named people to agree before a case moves on, rather than accepting whichever one responds first. That is the difference between a genuine multi-party approval and a formality that any single person can complete.
The stage carries a deadline, and overdue work generates reminders automatically rather than waiting for someone to notice, including on mobile. The item stays visibly overdue rather than disappearing back into an inbox.
It can be reopened without starting again, and the reopening is itself recorded in the history. Cases can also be cancelled or deleted where that is genuinely the right outcome, with the same trail — nothing is removed quietly.
A template can be retired and brought back without losing the cases already running on it. Cases in flight continue on the definition they started with, so improving a process does not mean abandoning the work already inside it.
Yes, for approval minutes, memos and letters. These are generated from the case, filled in from what it already holds, and filed in the right place, which removes the step where somebody copies details out of the system and into a blank document.
No. Workflow actions follow the same permissions as the document repository, and view, edit and approve are separate rights. Being asked to act on a case does not widen what that person can see beyond it.