When we built Pactthread's approval routing module, we started by mapping how procurement contracts actually moved through approval in teams that did not have a CLM. What we found was that the same three failure patterns appeared across nearly every workflow we analyzed, regardless of company size or industry.
These are not exotic problems. They are the predictable result of building approval workflows on email threads and calendar invites, which is how most growing procurement teams operate before they formalize the process. Understanding exactly where the delays come from is the first step to addressing them, and routing logic can solve two of the three completely.
Bottleneck 1: The Single Approver Who Is Everywhere
In most procurement approval workflows, there is one person who is required to sign off on contracts above a certain value threshold, typically the General Counsel or CFO. That person is also in meetings, traveling, managing direct reports, and fielding requests from fifteen other directions simultaneously. When a contract lands in their inbox for approval, it is competing with everything else on their plate.
The problem is compounded by how approval requests are typically delivered. An email with "please review and approve attached" and no context about urgency, contract value, or what specifically needs attention sits in the queue the same as every other email. The approver cannot easily distinguish between a time-sensitive vendor contract that is blocking a project kickoff and a routine annual renewal that can wait a week.
Routing logic addresses this directly. A well-configured approval workflow sends approval requests with structured context: contract type, contract value, counterparty, requested execution date, and whether there are open redlines still under discussion. High-value contracts or time-sensitive submissions are flagged and escalated automatically if unacknowledged after a defined period. The approver gets the same overall volume but can make faster prioritization decisions because the context arrives pre-packaged.
The routing logic can also handle delegation. If the primary approver is out, the system routes to a defined delegate rather than waiting for the primary to return. Most email-based workflows handle this inconsistently, which is why a one-week GC vacation can create a two-week contract backlog that takes three weeks to clear.
Bottleneck 2: The Parallel Approver Who Did Not Know They Were Needed
Procurement contracts frequently require approvals from more than one function: legal for contract terms, finance for budget confirmation, IT security for data handling provisions, or the business unit lead for scope and timeline. In an email-based workflow, these parallel approvals almost always happen sequentially because the person routing the contract sends it to legal first, waits for a response, then forwards to finance, then to the business unit lead.
The sequential routing pattern is not malicious. It is the natural result of a person trying to manage multiple threads in their head. They want legal's input before sending to finance because legal might flag something that changes the terms. They send to the business unit lead last because they think the lead only cares about the final version.
The problem is that every sequential step adds days. If legal review takes three days, finance confirmation takes two days, and business unit sign-off takes two days, a workflow that could have run in parallel over three days instead takes seven. Multiply that by the volume of contracts in a typical procurement cycle and the aggregate delay is significant.
Routing logic with parallel approval paths solves this almost entirely. Approvals that do not depend on each other can run simultaneously. Legal gets the draft contract. Finance gets the budget and payment terms section. The business unit lead gets a simplified view of scope and timeline. All three review tracks open at once, and the contract proceeds when all three have confirmed. The total elapsed time is the longest single review track, not the sum of all tracks.
The configuration work required here is modest but important: someone has to define which approvers are required for which contract types and values, which can run in parallel, and which are sequential dependencies. Most teams have this knowledge informally. Encoding it into a routing matrix is the work, and it is a one-time investment that pays off on every subsequent contract.
Bottleneck 3: The Information Gap That Sends Approvals Backward
The third bottleneck is the hardest to solve with routing logic alone, because it originates in the quality of the contract submission, not the approval workflow. A contract arrives for approval with missing information, or the approver has questions that require going back to the submitter, or there is an unresolved redline that the approver cannot make a decision on without more context.
When this happens, the contract moves backward in the workflow. The approver puts it on hold, sends a question by email, and the contract exits the structured process. The submitter may not respond for two days. The contract sits in an ambiguous state that no one can see clearly, and the delay is invisible to anyone not directly involved.
Routing logic can reduce the frequency of this pattern through intake requirements: an approval workflow that requires complete, structured submission data before a contract enters the queue prevents approvals from arriving with missing information. If a contract cannot be submitted without specifying the counterparty name, contract value, contract type, and any open issues, the quality of submissions entering the approval queue improves.
What routing logic cannot solve is the case where the approver has a substantive question about the contract terms that requires negotiation or clarification. That is a legitimate touchpoint that needs human handling. What we can do is build a structured back-channel: questions from approvers get routed back to the submitter within the system, with timestamps and a status flag that makes the delay visible to everyone who needs to know. The contract does not fall into an email black hole; it is marked as "pending response from submitter" and the queue shows that status clearly.
What Routing Logic Cannot Fix
We have been honest throughout this article about what routing logic addresses and what it does not. The third bottleneck, information gaps in submissions, is only partially addressable through workflow configuration. The other thing routing logic cannot fix is an approval matrix that has not been agreed to by the relevant approvers.
If the CFO has not actually agreed that contracts under $50,000 can be approved by the VP of Finance without CFO review, a routing system that implements that rule will still get overridden informally. Approvers who feel their authority is being bypassed will find ways to insert themselves. The routing configuration has to reflect decisions that leadership has genuinely made and communicated, not just decisions that procurement thinks leadership has made.
This is why the most important step before configuring an approval workflow is sitting down with every required approver and agreeing explicitly on what they need to see, at what thresholds, and what happens when they are unavailable. The conversation is often more valuable than the software. The software then makes the agreed process operational and consistent, which is a meaningful improvement over email, but it is not a substitute for the alignment work that has to happen first.