Power Automate. The default for anyone already on Microsoft 365, because the license is a sunk cost and the connectors to SharePoint, Outlook, Teams and SQL are included. We covered practical Power Automate use cases across departments separately.
Your ERP’s built-in workflow. Acumatica, Sage Intacct, CMiC and most others include approval routing. Use it for anything that stays inside the ERP, because it always reconciles.
Custom development, justified when the logic is genuinely specific to your business and no platform models it.
Automating a process nobody agreed on
If two divisions do it differently, automation forces a standardization decision that should have been made by people first.
No exception path
Every workflow needs a defined route for the case the rules do not cover, or people work around the system permanently and you have lost the data.
Silent failures
If an automation stops running and nobody is alerted, the process is now less reliable than the manual version it replaced.
Automating the approval but not the data
If someone still retypes the approved amount into the ERP afterward, you automated the easy half and kept the error-prone half.
Baseline the current cycle time from real dates over the last ninety days, before building anything.
Set a target. Halving cycle time is realistic for a routing-heavy process.
Track exception rate. If more than roughly fifteen percent of cases fall outside the rules, the rules are wrong rather than the cases.
Track failure rate and alert on it.
Review at sixty days and adjust. The first version is never the final one.
