Signed off by the people who run the process, not just the people who fund it.

A maritime and shipping services group in Singapore was moving procurement, supplier management and invoicing onto Coupa.

The familiar failure here is a design approved by people who will never use it. A sponsor signs, the build proceeds, and the objections surface during user acceptance testing — at the point where changing anything is most expensive.

Design was documented and revised in the open. The business process document moved through eight versions in six weeks: initial draft, confirmed designs, revisions after playback sessions, updated invoice tolerances and receipt process flow, revised global settings and diagrams, the client's own comments, finalisation, and exchange rate handling.

The eighth revision came after an architecture review with the platform vendor — the design checked against the product's own architects before anything was built on it.

The approval list is the part worth copying. Alongside the project owner and project manager, four named process owners signed the document, with the group finance director and group managing director on distribution. The people who run purchasing, receiving and invoicing approved the design of purchasing, receiving and invoicing.

The document itself covers chart of accounts, budget, requisition and purchase order setup with change approval, receiving tolerances and receipt approval chains, invoice setup, approval, presentation and tolerance, contracts, commodities, standard and custom roles with mapping, custom fields, submission blockers and warnings, and the approval chains themselves.

Eight revisions sounds like indecision. It is the opposite: each one is an objection caught while it was still cheap to fix. The revisions you do not see are the ones that surface as change requests after go-live.