Margin of Error

The villain in this story isn't a person.

It's a process. A process that nobody owns, everyone uses, and no one has questioned in four years. A process so deeply embedded in the daily workflow that challenging it feels like questioning gravity.

I'm talking about the approval chain.

The Setup

The company — a mid-sized operator with about 200 employees — had a standard procurement approval process. Anything over $500 needed manager approval. Over $5,000 needed director approval. Over $25,000 needed VP approval.

Simple. Logical. The kind of process that makes perfect sense when you write it on a whiteboard.

In practice, it was destroying them.

The Villain Revealed

Here's what the approval chain actually looked like in the wild:

An engineer needs a $600 software license. They submit a request. Their manager is in back-to-back meetings until Thursday. The request sits. Thursday comes — the manager approves it but has a question about the budget code. Email sent. Engineer responds Friday. Manager approves Monday.

Seven business days for a $600 decision.

Now multiply that across every team, every week. The procurement team tracked it: the average approval time for requests under $5,000 was 8.3 business days. For requests over $25,000 — the ones that actually needed careful review — it was 8.7 business days.

Read that again. The small decisions took almost as long as the big ones.

The Hidden Cost

I asked the finance team to calculate the cost of delay. They'd never been asked that question before.

The answer was staggering.

Between waiting time, follow-up emails, workarounds (people splitting purchases to stay under thresholds), and projects delayed by procurement bottlenecks, the approval process was costing the company roughly $40,000 per month in lost productivity.

That's $480,000 a year. Spent on a process designed to save money.

"The most expensive processes in any organization are the ones designed to prevent waste. The irony writes itself."

The Confrontation

When I presented this to the leadership team, the reaction was predictable. Denial, then disbelief, then a long silence.

"But we need approvals," the CFO said. "We can't just let people spend whatever they want."

"You're right," I said. "But right now, your approval process costs more than the spending it's designed to prevent."

The room went quiet.

The Resolution

The fix wasn't revolutionary. They raised the automatic approval threshold to $2,500 for pre-approved vendor categories. They implemented a 48-hour SLA for all other approvals. They created a monthly spend review instead of individual transaction approvals for recurring costs.

The result: average approval time dropped from 8.3 days to 1.2 days. The $480,000 annual drag disappeared.

And here's the thing nobody expected: total spending actually decreased by 4%. When people could get things approved quickly, they stopped hoarding budget "just in case" and buying in bulk to avoid future approval delays.

The villain was defeated. Not with a sword, but with a spreadsheet and the courage to question something everyone assumed was necessary.

That's margin recovery. Finding the villains that aren't people.