The situation
A 22-person engineering consultancy in Newcastle was processing around 40 contracts a month: a mix of project agreements and master service arrangements with infrastructure clients. The approval process lived entirely in email. Someone would attach a PDF to a message, mark it urgent, and then wait. Sometimes the right person approved it within a day. Often the email sat in an inbox while that person was on site, in a client meeting, or simply working through a full queue.
The average time from contract submission to approval had drifted to 12 days. Some contracts were being lost entirely, buried in a thread that nobody had moved forward. The operations manager was spending significant time chasing status updates by phone. There was no audit trail, no visibility into where any given contract stood, and no mechanism to escalate when an approver had not acted.
The flow we built
Microsoft Forms now serves as the contract intake point. The submitter enters the contract metadata, selects the contract type, and uploads the document. Power Automate reads the contract value and routes an Approvals request to the right approver tier: Manager for contracts under $20,000, Director for $20,000 to $100,000, and Partner above that.
The approved or rejected document lands in a SharePoint library with version control and a stage tag that reflects its current position in the review chain. A Power BI dashboard tracks time-in-stage for every open contract. If a contract sits with an approver for more than 48 hours without action, the next approver in the chain and the operations manager both receive a Teams alert. The escalation is automatic and requires no manual monitoring.
The platforms
Microsoft Forms, Power Automate, Microsoft Approvals, SharePoint, and Power BI are all part of the firm's existing Microsoft 365 licensing. No new platform subscriptions were required. The workflow runs on a Bot Care Advanced tier, with monitoring that catches permission changes in the SharePoint library or connector deprecations that would otherwise break the routing silently.
The results
Average contract approval time dropped from 12 days to 3 days within the first month. The operations manager stopped making status calls. Every contract now has a timestamped audit trail from submission through to the final signature event.
The change was behavioural as much as technical. When approvers can see in the Power BI dashboard that their queue is visible to leadership, and when a 48-hour timer surfaces their name in an escalation alert, review priority shifts. The technology did not change how long it takes to review a contract; it changed whether contracts got reviewed promptly.
What this could look like for your engineering or professional services firm
If contract approvals depend on email and institutional memory, a workflow like this typically cuts approval time by 70 to 80 percent and eliminates the chasing overhead entirely. We build these inside your existing Microsoft 365 environment, so there is nothing new for staff to learn.