English
What customer need does this solve?
Many companies still handle leave, overtime, equipment, or small internal requests through chat, email, spreadsheets, or verbal approval. The work looks simple, but the cost appears later: missing history, unclear status, repeated follow-up, and no reliable data for planning.
A leave request is a good starting point because everyone understands it. If this basic flow is hard to use, more complex approval processes will not be adopted.
What the solution should solve
The solution should turn a request into a structured case: who requested it, what they asked for, when it was submitted, who needs to approve it, and what decision was made. The employee should not need to understand the process design. They should only fill the right form and submit.
The business then gets one source of truth instead of many scattered conversations. Managers can see pending work, employees can see status, and operations can later measure cycle time and bottlenecks.
Trade-offs and alternatives
The benefit is clarity and traceability. The trade-off is that the company must define the minimum fields and approval steps. A workflow system should not ask for more information than the decision requires.
Alternatives include keeping requests in chat, using shared spreadsheets, or buying a separate HR tool. Chat is fast but hard to audit. Spreadsheets are flexible but fragile. A dedicated HR tool can work for HR-only scope, while a BPM platform is better when the same pattern needs to expand to finance, procurement, IT, and operations.
Conclusion
Digitization starts with making routine work visible. A leave request is small, but it proves the core promise: employees submit work easily, managers approve consistently, and the company gains clean operational data.