Fairlane makes precision components for the automotive supply chain. Seven hundred and sixty people across two sites, twelve of them in finance, and a purchase-approval process that everyone agreed was too slow and nobody was willing to loosen.
The situation
The process was thorough. Every purchase above a low threshold went to a requisition workflow, then to a line manager, then — depending on the value — to a second approver, and finally to finance.
- A requisition workflow with four steps and no way to skip an unnecessary one.
- An expense tool for everything the workflow did not cover, which was most small spend.
- Two card portals, both read-only, both a month behind.
The approvals themselves were nearly all rubber stamps. Somebody had already decided that a particular engineer could buy particular consumables from a particular supplier up to a particular value, and then the system asked a manager to confirm that decision every single time it was acted on. Four days was the median, and the queue was longest exactly when the line was busiest.
The change
Fairlane moved the policy from the process to the card. The limit, the categories and the approved supplier list are attributes of the card itself, so a purchase that fits them settles without asking anybody, and a purchase that does not never settles at all.
That inverted what approval is for. It stopped being a check that something was allowed and became a decision about something genuinely unusual — which is a decision a manager is happy to be asked for, because there are now about a third as many of them.
We were not approving purchases. We were re-approving a policy we had already written down, once per purchase.
Bram de Vries · Operations Finance Lead, Fairlane
The outcome
Approval volume fell sixty-two per cent, and the ones that remain clear in about six hours rather than four days.
Control got tighter rather than looser, which was the part that had to be proved before anything shipped. In the first full quarter there were no policy breaches settled at all — not because nobody tried, but because a card that cannot spend outside its policy is a harder control than a person checking afterwards.
