I’ve been struggling with delayed approvals in our procurement process. Last week, an urgent request got stuck because the manager was OOO and their deputy wasn’t notified properly. I’m curious - how do others handle approval chain failures?
I’m testing a system where backup approvers automatically get pinged if primary contacts don’t respond within SLA. The AI agents monitor response times and escalate through predefined paths. So far it’s reduced delays by 60%, but I’m wondering:
How granular should escalation tiers be?
What’s the ideal SLA window before triggering escalation?
Anyone using conditional logic for dynamic backup selection?
Looking for real-world examples of successful escalation implementations.
What thresholds and fallback mechanisms work best in practice?
We automated this using Latenode’s AI teams. Set primary and backup approvers with tiered escalation rules. If first approver doesn’t respond in 24hrs, task moves to backup while notifying both parties. Saved us 15hrs/week in stalled processes.
At my last company we used Zapier with Google Sheets for this. Created a spreadsheet tracking approval SLAs, with AppSheet sending escalation emails. Clunky but worked. Now prefer systems with native escalation features - reduces maintenance overhead.
Critical detail: Make sure escalation paths account for time zones. We learned this hard way when backups were sleeping during primary’s outages. Now our system checks working hours before escalation and routes to next available timezone if needed. Also recommend weekly test escalations to verify paths remain valid.