case study — process automation & decision logic
From Manual Reviews to
Rules-Based Auto-Approval
I identified, designed, and led the implementation of an internal application that automated the approval process behind billing credits for customer disputes. It replaced a fully manual, spreadsheet-based workflow with a centralized application connected directly to the company's data systems — cutting approval turnaround from ~2 business days to 2–3 minutes on hundreds of requests per month.
~2 business days (~99% reduction)
validation checks pass
approval history
01 — The problem
Two days of process around a two-minute decision
Before a billing credit could be issued, every customer dispute had to be validated. The ~2-day turnaround wasn't caused by the decision itself — it was everything around it: manual data retrieval, manual recalculation, and email-based handoffs accounted for nearly all of the elapsed time.
Where the time went
Every step was manual
Every request was checked by hand, retrieving the relevant records one at a time. The correct values had to be recalculated manually for each case. Data, calculations and approvals lived in scattered spreadsheets and email handoffs — with no centralized record or audit trail.
What it cost
Slow resolution, inconsistent decisions, revenue risk
End-to-end approval took around 2 business days — delaying dispute resolution, degrading customer experience, and tying up team capacity. Manual recalculation increased the risk of inconsistent decisions and revenue leakage, and the lack of an audit trail made decisions hard to defend after the fact.
02 — The solution I designed
Direct data integration + a rule engine that decides
An internal application that centralizes the entire approval workflow and automates the decision itself. When all validation checks pass, the request is approved automatically — agents simply process the credit using the approved values.
Bulk processing
From one-at-a-time to one run
A template-based upload lets agents validate multiple requests in a single run instead of one at a time — the throughput multiplier on top of the per-request speedup.
Searchable approval history
An audit trail that didn't exist before
Every decision is stored centrally and fully retrievable — a complete, auditable record replacing local files and email threads.
03 — My role
From bottleneck analysis to functional design to rollout
I owned the solution end to end on the business side — the IT team built from my functional design, with me acting as business owner throughout development, testing, and rollout.
Analysis & design
Turning process knowledge into decision rules
Identified the automation opportunity by analyzing bottlenecks and cycle-time drivers in the existing workflow. Analyzed historical data to define validation thresholds, tolerance ranges and expected-value logic. Designed the end-to-end process flow, business logic, calculation rules, auto-approval criteria and exception-handling paths.
Delivery & adoption
Requirements, testing, training
Specified the data requirements and matching conditions for the integration, translating business rules into functional requirements for the development team. Led user acceptance testing, validating application output against independently calculated expected results. Wrote the user documentation and trained the operational teams on the new tool.
04 — Impact
~99% faster, standardized, and fully auditable
Applied to hundreds of requests per month, the application removed the manual review entirely for passing requests and left an auditable record of every decision.
Before / after
The same decision, without the process around it
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Approval turnaround | ~2 business days | 2–3 minutes (~99% reduction) |
| Approval decision | Manual review by agents | Automated, rules-based |
| Data retrieval | Manual lookups, one by one | Direct data integration |
| Process | Spreadsheets, email handoffs | Centralized application |
| Throughput | One request at a time | Bulk validation in a single run |
| Audit trail | None (local files) | Full searchable history |
05 — Skills demonstrated