How we automated vendor onboarding and cut approval time by 90%

A mid-size logistics company came to us with a familiar problem: onboarding a new vendor took an average of 18 business days. Not because the work was hard — because it was scattered across six inboxes, three spreadsheets, and one person's memory of "who signed off on what."

We rebuilt the whole thing as a single automated pipeline. New approval time: under 2 days, with zero manual chasing.

Why vendor onboarding breaks down

Every vendor onboarding involves the same handful of steps — intake form, compliance check, insurance verification, contract routing, finance setup — but almost nobody automates the handoffs between them. Each step lived with a different team, and nothing told the next team a step was done. Vendors sat in limbo because nobody was explicitly "on the hook" to move them forward.

💡

The real bottleneck wasn't approval speed — it was that no single system tracked where a vendor was in the process. Everyone assumed someone else was handling it.

Step 1: A single intake source of truth

We replaced the scattered intake emails with one structured form feeding directly into a Make scenario. The moment a vendor submits their details, a record is created in Airtable with a status field that every downstream step updates automatically — no more "let me check with someone."

Step 2: Parallel, not sequential, approvals

The old process ran compliance, insurance, and finance checks one after another, each waiting on the last. We re-architected it so all three run in parallel the moment intake completes, with Slack notifications routed directly to the right approver — not a shared inbox.

Auto-escalation

If an approver hasn't responded within 24 hours, the workflow automatically escalates to their manager with a one-click approve/reject Slack action — no chasing required.

Step 3: Automatic system provisioning

Once all three approvals land, the vendor is automatically created in the ERP, assigned a vendor ID, and added to the payment run schedule — the step that used to take the finance team an extra 3-4 days on its own.

The results

Average onboarding time dropped from 18 days to under 2
Zero vendors "lost" in the process over 4 months of monitoring
The ops team reclaimed roughly 12 hours per week previously spent on status-chasing emails

"We didn't realize how much of our delay was just people not knowing whose turn it was. Fixing that alone was worth the project."

If your onboarding process lives in someone's inbox, it's costing you more than you think. Book a discovery call and we'll map out what's automatable.