How a 400-person company cut approval time from 5 days to 4 hours
A construction group in Almaty replaced paper sign-offs with routed digital approvals. Here is what changed, what broke in the first week, and the numbers six months later.
The company asked not to be named. Figures are from their own MyDesk analytics dashboard, exported in August 2026.
The starting point
Every vacation request, equipment handover and business-trip order travelled as a printed form through three to five signatures. The average cycle was five working days; the slowest 10% took over two weeks because a director was travelling.
HR kept a spreadsheet to know where each form was. Nobody could answer "what is waiting on me?" without walking the corridor.
What they changed
- Rebuilt the 12 most common forms in the document constructor, with required fields so incomplete requests could not be submitted.
- Defined approval chains per request type — vacation goes to the line manager then HR; equipment goes to IT and finance in parallel.
- Set fallback approvers with a 48-hour timeout, so a travelling director no longer blocks the chain.
- Turned on Telegram notifications for approvers; email stayed on for HR.
Week one: what broke
Two things. Managers approved from their phone without reading, so HR added a one-line summary to every card. And a handful of employees kept printing the PDF and bringing it to HR — habit, not resistance. Both settled by week three.
Six months later
- Median approval time: 4 hours (from 5 days).
- Requests stuck longer than 3 days: 2% (from 31%).
- HR time spent locating forms: effectively zero.
- Paper: only documents that still legally require a wet signature — see our compliance guide.
What to copy
Start with the three request types that generate the most complaints, not the most volume. Define who approves in writing before you touch the tool. And put the fallback approver in from day one — it is the single setting that made the biggest difference.