The deal waited a week for approval. The SLA did not wait at all.

A partner cannot chase what they cannot see

Registering a deal meant submitting it into a manual approval workflow and waiting. Multiple teams reviewed it in sequence, and typical approval ran 5 to 7 days. The partner had no visibility into any of that: not which stage it was at, not who held it, not whether it had stalled.

The case side had the same shape and a harder deadline. Support teams tracked SLA status by hand, which meant a case at risk was identified by someone remembering to look. Around 30% of cases breached.

• Approvals ran sequentially through steps that had no reason to wait on each other.
• SLA monitoring was manual, so the first reliable signal that a deadline mattered was it being missed.
• Partners escalated to get status, which added the load of answering those questions on top of the work causing them.

A missed SLA is a monitoring failure, not a capacity one

The instinct with a 30% breach rate is to look at throughput. But these cases were not being missed because there was no time to work them; they were being missed because nothing announced that the clock was running out while there was still time to act.

That reframes the fix. Rather than adding capacity, make the deadline visible while it can still be met, and route the case to whoever can meet it. The same logic applies on the deal side: an approval that takes a week because it queues is not slow work, it is unparallelised work.

Approvals in one workflow, the clock in plain sight

Sales Cloud centralises deal registration and management, with a custom Approval Lightning Web Component carrying the approval itself, so the review runs as one workflow rather than a relay between teams. Experience Cloud gives partners a way to see their own deals, and Chatter puts the collaboration where both sides can follow it instead of in private threads.

Case management sits in Service Cloud with a live SLA timer against each case and custom notifications that fire as a case approaches its threshold (before the breach, not after). Omni-Channel routes work by capacity rather than by who noticed it, and an Einstein Bot handles the assistance that does not need an agent.

Approvals came down 70%, breaches 40%, and manual handling 30%. The partners' side of that is simpler to state: they can see where a deal stands without asking.