Workflow Systems in New Zealand

Document the process you actually run

This is the cheapest week of the project and the one most often skipped.

Sit down and write out what really happens, not what the policy says. For each step: who does it, what they need in front of them to decide, how long they usually take, and what happens when they are away.

Then go looking for the exceptions, because there are always more than anyone expects:

• The urgent one that skips two approvals because a customer is waiting.
• The customer or supplier who has different terms for historical reasons.
• The manager who signs for their own team, which the policy forbids and everyone does.
• The step that is officially required and has not been done since 2022.
• The request that comes in by phone and gets typed in afterwards.

Every one of those is either a requirement or a decision to stop doing it. Discovered before quoting, they are lines in a brief. Discovered during the build, they are change requests, and together they are why these projects run over.

Check whether you already own the answer

If your business runs on Microsoft 365, you are already paying for Power Automate, SharePoint lists and Forms. Between them they cover a surprising number of approval workflows without a developer at all.

They run out when:

• The routing rules are genuinely complicated — value thresholds, multiple approvers, conditional paths.
• You need an audit trail that cannot be quietly edited by anyone with access to the list.
• Volume is high enough that the licensing or the performance starts to hurt.
• The workflow needs to live inside software your staff are already using, rather than in another tab.
• It has to read from and write to systems that no connector reaches.

Ask every developer quoting whether an off-the-shelf tool would do it. The ones who say yes and lose the job are the ones worth calling next time.

The questions that separate the quotes

What happens when the approver is on leave?

A workflow with no delegation and no escalation stalls silently. Somebody discovers three weeks later that a purchase order has been waiting on a person who left in June. What you want to hear:

• Approvers can delegate, and delegation is recorded in the trail.
• A step that sits too long escalates to someone above it.
• There is a screen showing everything currently stuck, and who it is stuck with.
• An administrator can reassign a step without editing the database.

What does the audit trail show a year later?

The reason to build rather than to use a spreadsheet is usually that somebody needs to be able to answer this. A useful trail records who did what, when, what the values were at the time, and what changed afterwards — and it cannot be edited by the people it records.

Build it so you can change it

Processes change. Approval limits move, someone new signs off on capital spend, a step is added after an audit. How the system is built decides whether that is an afternoon or an invoice.

Ask directly: which parts can our own administrator change without you? The good answer covers approval thresholds, who is in which role, notification wording, deadlines and escalation timings. The rules being in a configuration screen rather than in code costs more up front and is nearly always cheaper across three years.

Be realistic about the limit, though. A fully configurable workflow engine is a much bigger build than one workflow, and most businesses do not need one.

Notifications are how it lives or dies

The failure mode of every workflow system is that people stop looking at it. Requests sit, someone chases by email, and within two months the process is running in email again with the system as a filing cabinet.

What prevents it is unglamorous:

• An email or Teams message that contains enough to decide, not just a link to log in.
• Approve and decline from that message where the risk allows it.
• A daily digest of what is waiting on you, rather than a notification per item.
• A reminder before something is late, not after.

Start with one process

The temptation is to build a platform covering every workflow in the business. Resist it. Pick the one process that hurts most, build that properly, and let people use it for two months.

You will learn things about your own requirements that no amount of workshop would have surfaced, and the second workflow on the same foundation costs a fraction of the first. A platform designed around six processes nobody has run yet is designed around six guesses.

Comparing five quotes

Read for:

• Who asked about exceptions, delegation and escalation before quoting?
• Who named an off-the-shelf tool that might do it?
• Who separated what you can configure from what needs a developer?
• Who has built a workflow in your industry, and can show you one?
• Who suggested starting with one process rather than all of them?

Describe the process, who touches it, roughly how many go through a month, and the exception everyone knows about. Developers who have done this before will ask what happens when the approver is on holiday, and they will ask it early.