Processes that existed only in people

What the business looked like before

There was a procedures manual. It was accurate. It was also irrelevant to how work actually moved, because every step in it depended on a person knowing which person to go to next.

That arrangement runs a company perfectly well until someone is on leave, or leaves. Then the company discovers that its procedures were never procedures — they were habits held by individuals, and the manual was a description of those habits rather than a system enforcing them.

The constraint that shaped the work

The processes themselves were not the problem and were not up for redesign. A holding company that has decided how procurement approval works has usually decided it for reasons — regulatory, commercial, or simply hard experience.

So the work was not to design a better process. It was to make the existing one binding.

What changed

Approval chains now run in the system: a request cannot skip a step because somebody is unavailable, and it cannot sit invisibly on a desk. Permissions are derived from the process rather than maintained as a separate list, which matters more than it sounds — a permission list maintained by hand drifts away from the process it was meant to reflect within months.

The part that took longest was the least visible: making sure the people who approve things can actually open the things they approve. That sounds obvious. It is the single most common way an implementation like this fails quietly, because the failure looks like people ignoring the new system rather than the new system refusing them.

What I would tell another holding company

If your procedures live in a document, they are not procedures. Test it: pick a process, remove the person who normally runs it, and see whether it completes. That is your real system.