Procurement approval times by function

Approval timelines vary significantly by owning department

Approval times vary significantly by the owning department. Requests originating from IT teams take the longest to approve, averaging 17 days – more than double the time required for tools owned by Sales, Finance, Operations, Product or Security, which average eight days. This reflects the additional scrutiny applied when tools impact core infrastructure, integrations or system architecture.

HR and Legal tools also face longer approval timelines (13 and 12 days respectively), driven by heightened requirements around data privacy, compliance and risk management. In contrast, tools owned by go-to-market and operational teams tend to move faster, as they are often lower risk or follow more standardized approval paths.

The nine-day gap between IT-owned and Product-owned tools highlights a bottleneck in technical intake and vetting – not stricter risk standards, but fragmented coordination. Streamlining approvals requires more structured workflows that route requests to the right stakeholders early and surface diligence insights upfront. Procurement orchestration software enables faster, more consistent approvals while maintaining rigorous risk controls.