One to four hours a week for each approver, most of it in the chasing rather than the approving, plus an audit trail that lives in a personal phone. It is the live layer most often found on top of a workflow tool that was bought to replace it.
Last reviewed 30 September 2026
At the surface, live. A photo of a quote goes to a manager on WhatsApp; the reply is a thumbs up; someone later screenshots the thread for the auditor. It works, which is why it has lasted. The workaround is faster than the system it bypasses.
An approval workflow in the ERP or a standalone tool, set up with the wrong approvers and never updated when people moved roles. Below that, a delegation-of-authority document that says who may approve what, which nobody has compared with the tool's settings.
Plain automation: the request raised where the work already is (email, a form, the ERP), routed by the rules in the delegation document, approved with one tap, and logged. AI only for reading the quote out of a photo. Under POPIA the audit trail belongs in a system the business controls, not on a personal device.
Counted from a week of threads with the approvers' consent, timing the chase as well as the decision. Checked against the number of purchase orders raised in the same week. The lower figure wins. How EMBR measures. This layer is one part of workaround debt; The Transect measures all of them together.
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