From Approval Workflow to End-to-End Workflow

2026-09-23

Executive Summary

• Approval workflow is a reasonable starting point, but its scope is narrow: it manages who signs, and when — not the full lifecycle of a business event.
• Academic research on end-to-end process management (University of Exeter, 2013) argues that the defining feature of a genuine “end-to-end” process is its scope — managing an extended boundary from the moment a customer request arises to the moment it’s fully fulfilled — not just a handful of steps in the middle.
• Most operational failure doesn’t happen inside a department. It happens at the handoff between departments — an observation widely made by BPM practitioners.
• A company can own dozens of approval workflows and still have zero true end-to-end workflow for its core processes.
• Moving from approval to end-to-end isn’t about adding steps. It’s about redefining where the process begins and ends.

Ask an operations director “how many workflows does your company have?” and the answer is usually a fairly large number — ten, twenty, sometimes more than thirty. Ask a follow-up question — “of those, how many track a single event, start to finish, all the way to actual resolution, across every department involved?” — and the number drops sharply, sometimes to zero.

This isn’t a random paradox. It reflects how most companies build workflow in the first place: starting with approval — the easiest thing to standardize, the easiest to measure, and usually the first thing to get digitized. But approval is a very thin slice of everything that actually needs to be managed.

→ Related: Digitized Workflow Is Not the Same as Optimized Workflow

What Approval Workflow Does and Doesn’t Cover

Approval workflow solves one specific problem well: controlling decision authority at one or a few points in a process.

Characteristics of approval workflow:

• There’s a request (leave, a purchase, a payment).
• There’s a chain of people who need to sign off, in order or by seniority.
• The workflow ends once enough signatures are collected — regardless of what happens afterward.

Why companies usually start here: Approval is easy to model — it has clear boundaries, few exceptions, and immediately visible value (no more lost paperwork, no more waiting for a physical signature). That’s a reasonable place to start, not a mistake.

The limit: Approval workflow answers “was this request approved?” It doesn’t answer the bigger question: “where does this whole matter actually end up, and who is accountable until it’s truly resolved?”

What Lies Outside Approval

This is the most commonly overlooked part when companies assess their own workflow maturity.

Take a concrete example: handling a customer quality complaint. The “approve the corrective action” step — if it even exists — is a tiny moment inside a much larger event. What lies outside the scope of approval includes:

1. Everything before approval: who receives the complaint, how it gets classified, who investigates the root cause, based on what evidence.
2. Everything after approval: how the corrective action actually gets carried out, who confirms it happened, whether the result gets checked afterward.
3. Closing the loop: whether the record is complete enough for an audit, whether the related SOP gets updated if the root cause traces back to a process gap.
4. Cross-departmental accountability: a complaint typically moves through sales (intake) → QA (investigation) → production (corrective action) → sales (customer response). Approval workflow usually digitizes exactly one link in that chain.

Research by Maddern, Smart, Maull and Childe (University of Exeter, 2013) on end-to-end process management makes an important point: the defining feature of a genuine “end-to-end process” isn’t the number of steps, it’s the scope — the ability to manage an extended boundary from the moment a customer request arises to the moment the customer is actually and fully served. In other words, a process can have plenty of carefully digitized approval steps and still not be end-to-end, if it only covers a short segment somewhere in the middle of the full journey.

The same research also notes that moving from functional process management to end-to-end management tends to be harder than expected — not primarily for technical reasons, but because it requires a systemic view of the process, not just a redrawn diagram of its steps.

What End-to-End Workflow Looks Like

Another useful, practitioner-level observation comes from the BPM analyst community: most operational failure doesn’t happen inside a department — it happens at the handoff between departments, where cost, delay and rework accumulate the most. Notably, local optimization efforts inside a single department can actually make these handoffs worse, because that department optimizes for its own metrics without accounting for how its output fits into the rest of the chain.

Putting these two observations together, a genuine end-to-end workflow needs:

• A clearly defined triggering event (a complaint gets logged, an order is created, a contract is signed) — not “when someone clicks a button to start the approval process.”
• A clearly defined final outcome, defined from the perspective of whoever the process serves (the customer, the requesting department) — not “when it gets approved.”
• Cross-departmental traceability, with evidence preserved at every handoff, not just at the sign-off point.
• A person or role accountable for the entire flow (a process owner) — not each department only accountable for its own piece.

That last point is usually the biggest real-world obstacle: asking someone to be accountable for an outcome they don’t fully control (because it depends on other departments) is something many organizations quietly avoid — not out of ignorance, but because it conflicts with how each department is currently measured.

A Roadmap for Expanding Coverage

There’s no need, and no reason, to turn every approval workflow into an end-to-end workflow at once. A sensible sequence:

Step 1 — Pick the right process to start with. Prioritize processes that are highly recurring, cross multiple departments, and directly affect customers or compliance — quality complaint handling, engineering change control, or incident management, for example.

Step 2 — Redraw the boundary, not just the steps. Define clearly: what event starts this process, and what outcome marks its true end (from the beneficiary’s perspective, not an internal one).

Step 3 — Identify the handoffs and who owns each one. This is where evidence design matters: every handoff between departments needs to be recorded, not passed along verbally or buried in email.

Step 4 — Assign a process owner. A role (not necessarily a new job title) accountable for tracking the entire flow, with the standing to request information from every department involved.

Step 5 — Only then think about technology. Choosing the tool to run an end-to-end workflow only becomes meaningful once the boundary, the handoffs, and the accountability are already clear.

→ Related: Next-Generation Workflow: When AI and Organizational Knowledge Change How Work Operates

Conclusion

Approval workflow isn’t wrong — it just answers a very narrow question. The problem starts when a company mistakes having digitized the sign-off points for having managed the whole process. End-to-end workflow isn’t an upgraded feature of approval workflow. It’s a different way of thinking about where a process begins and ends — from a single approval moment to the full journey from first event to final outcome.

This article is part of a series on workflow, AI adoption, and operational management for manufacturing SMEs.

Related articles:

• You Have Workflow. Why Is Work Still Moving Slowly?
• Digitized Workflow Is Not the Same as Optimized Workflow
• Next-Generation Workflow: When AI and Organizational Knowledge Change How Work Operates

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