Answer
A concrete example is a purchase order that exceeds a spending threshold and needs manager sign-off before it releases to the vendor, or a credit hold that requires a finance review before an order ships. In many IBM i shops today, that approval step lives entirely in email or in a phone call, which means there is no record of how long the approval took, who eventually approved it, or whether it happened at all before someone manually pushed the order through anyway under pressure. Making that step visible inside the automation platform turns an invisible bottleneck into something measurable and improvable.
Buyers should ask vendors specifically how the platform handles a workflow that is waiting on a person: what happens if the approver does not respond within a defined window, whether the request escalates automatically to a backup approver, and whether the workflow can resume exactly where it left off once the human step completes rather than restarting from the beginning. It is also worth asking whether approvals can happen from a mobile device or a simple web link rather than requiring the approver to log into a green-screen session, since a human approval step that is technically automated but practically inconvenient will just get bypassed the first time someone is traveling or unavailable.