Workflow and Business Process Automation

Nobody can say where the file is

Ask a chief operating officer how long a purchase requisition takes and you get a range, not a number. Ask where a particular one is today and somebody has to go and look. A paper file exists in one place at a time, and that place is whichever tray it was last put into. It waits while a signatory is upcountry for the week. It sits behind a manager on leave, and whoever is covering does not know it is there.

Institutions here have spent a decade digitising the side the customer sees: accounts open on a phone, cash comes out at an agent counter. Inside the same building, work still moves on printed forms, signatures and a stamp, because paper is what everyone trusts as evidence. An approval routine designed when the whole institution sat in one building is still in use across a branch network in several regions, and it now takes a week to do what it once did in an afternoon.

For a regulated business the cost is not only delay. A supervised institution has to show how a decision was reached and who was entitled to reach it. The Bank of Tanzania supervises banking, and internal audit and your board will ask the same kind of question. When the answer sits in files held in different offices, every request becomes a small project. This weighs most where authority is concentrated at head office and the work is spread across the country: banks, SACCOs whose committees meet monthly, microfinance institutions whose officers are in the field all week, telcos and fintechs hiring faster than anyone is redesigning how work moves between them.

The work that gets stuck

The processes worth taking off paper are rarely the ones a customer sees, and most are not banking at all. Credit applications and limit approvals. Procurement: requisitions, purchase orders, supplier onboarding and invoice approval. Payments needing a second or third authoriser. Leave, recruitment, staff onboarding, transfers and exit. Expense and travel claims. Customer requests that are not transactions: statement letters, standing order changes, account closures, complaints and the escalations behind them.

Exception handling deserves separate mention, because it is where the money and the risk are. A fee reversal, a charge waived, a manual correction, a write-off, a limit overridden. These are the least documented decisions in most institutions, and the ones an auditor is most likely to ask about a year later.

Which of these matters most differs by institution. A bank's heaviest load is credit and exceptions, which cross several departments. A SACCO's is membership and loan approval, decided by committees whose members have other jobs, so waiting for a quorum is the real delay. A microfinance institution's problem is distance: an officer in the field cannot put a file in front of a manager the same day. A telco or fintech is buried in procurement and staff movement, because suppliers and headcount both grow every month. Which go first is decided with you, and we will argue for the frequent and contained ahead of the largest.

What changes when the work moves on its own

A request is raised by the person who needs it, from wherever they are, and reaches the person whose decision it needs with what they require to decide already in front of them. They approve it, decline it, or send it back with a question. Then it moves on. Nobody carries it and nobody photocopies it.

For the executive, questions that were unanswerable become ordinary: how many requisitions are open, how many are older than they should be, which step things sit at longest, and at whose desk. Time to complete stops being an anecdote and becomes a number you can watch move.

Every decision carries who made it and when, which turns a request from your auditors or your board into a search rather than a reconstruction. None of this replaces your core banking, accounting or human resources systems. What has rarely had an owner is the work between them, which is where the days go.

Automating a bad process makes it faster, not better

If a requisition needs five approvals because of something that went wrong years ago, and nobody has revisited it since, then automating it gives you a five-approval process that runs quickly. You will have paid to make the same delay more visible.

So the process gets examined first. Most processes carry steps that policy requires, steps a regulator requires, and steps that survive only because somebody once insisted. The third group is usually where the delay sits. Taking one out is your decision rather than ours, but we will keep asking.

Expect this to be uncomfortable. Approval steps are status as much as control, and the manager who signs a form third has an interest in continuing to sign it. It is also where the return is: the steps that come out are worth more than the steps that get faster, and an institution unwilling to remove any is buying a quicker version of what it has.

What has to be settled on your side

Start with the processes as they actually run, which is not what the procedure manual says. Every institution has two versions, the documented one and the one people use because the documented one does not survive a Friday afternoon, and the second is the one to build from. Getting it written down means sitting with the people who do the work, and they will only be candid if it is clear the exercise is not about catching them out.

Then authority. Who may approve what, up to what value, who acts in their absence, and what happens when the person who must approve is the person asking. Most institutions have parts of this settled: a credit mandate in writing, the rest by custom. Bringing it into one position is an executive exercise, and in a regulated business your board will want to see it.

Then a sponsor. These processes cross finance, operations, human resources and risk, and the argument about who owns which step will not be settled by a working group made up of the people having it. Somebody senior enough to make a decision a department dislikes has to be attached from the beginning.

Finally, positions on information. Staff records, customer details and supporting documents move through these processes, and Tanzania has a Personal Data Protection Act. Who inside the institution may see what, and how long a record of a decision is kept, are policy decisions for you.

How this engagement runs

Discovery means time with the people who do the work as well as the people who own the policy, because the difference between the two is the whole subject. You come out with your processes documented as they run and a scope and a plan, and the plan is yours whether or not we build it.

Through delivery you see working software in an environment you control, and the source code and documentation are yours from the first commit. We will argue for one process taken all the way to live before the rest are designed, because the first teaches you more than the analysis did. Afterwards we support it and train your people. There is no lock-in, by design and by contract.