Modernizing Discount Governance with a Smart Approval Platform

In regulated industries, discount approvals significantly affect financial control and compliance. Each approval must comply with internal policies while supporting daily operations. Achieving this balance is difficult when approvals rely on manual coordination and fragmented workflows.

A leading pharmaceutical company in Indonesia faced this challenge within its commercial organization. To address these issues, the company partnered with Kitameraki to streamline the submission, review, and approval of discounts. Kitameraki developed the Smart Discount platform, transforming the entire approval process.

How Discount Approvals Were Managed

Before engaging Kitameraki, the client managed discount approvals through a combination of manual tools and informal workflows across teams:

• Manual discount submission processes

• Inconsistent approval routing

• Limited visibility into historical discount performance

• Difficulty enforcing policy thresholds

• Lack of centralized monitoring

• No structured audit trail

As discount complexity increased, these limitations became more apparent. The organization needed a more standardized and scalable approach, one that could support multi-level approvals, handle policy-driven exceptions, and provide leadership with clearer visibility while maintaining strong data governance.

Moving Toward a Centralized Discount Approval Process

To address these limitations, the organization engaged Kitameraki to define a more structured and governable approach to managing discount approvals. The work began by reviewing existing approval patterns, policy thresholds, and exception cases to understand where control was breaking down and where manual work was slowing commercial execution.

How Kitameraki Designed the Smart Discount Platform

Based on this assessment, Kitameraki designed a centralized Smart Discount application built on Microsoft Power Platform. The solution translated internal policies into structured workflows and approval logic, ensuring governance requirements were consistently enforced without adding unnecessary friction to daily operations.

The system introduced:

• Structured digital submission workflows 

• Automated multi-level approvals 

• Exemption management logic 

• Real-time notification system 

• Centralized audit tracking 

• Interactive monitoring dashboards 

Each submission is evaluated against defined rules and historical context shaped during the design phase. All approvals are captured in a single system, creating a transparent and traceable process aligned with governance and compliance requirements.

How the Platform Supports Day-to-Day Discount Approvals

With the approval structure in place, Kitameraki designed the Smart Discount platform to fit naturally into daily workflows across commercial, finance, and management teams. The focus was on ensuring that governance controls operated consistently in the background, without slowing routine decision-making.

Key capabilities include:

• End-to-end digital lifecycle: From submission to final authorization, every step is automated and logged. 

• Policy-aware validation: Requests are evaluated against predefined thresholds, with smart escalation when exemptions are required.

• Role-based experience: Different stakeholders access tailored interfaces aligned with their responsibilities.

• Executive monitoring dashboard: Leadership gains real-time insight into discount trends and operational performance. 

• Audit-ready documentation: Every approval is archived with a full decision trail for governance compliance. 

This approach ensured that governance rules were applied consistently while remaining practical for teams handling discounts on a daily basis.

Operational Improvements Following Implementation

With a clear approval structure and shared visibility in place, discussions became more focused and decisions moved more quickly toward action.

Following implementation, the Smart Discount platform delivered measurable transformation across organization:

• Faster approval turnaround 

• Reduced administrative overhead 

• Improved compliance enforcement 

• Organization-wide transparency 

• Stronger data-driven decision making 

• Complete audit visibility 

Beyond immediate efficiency gains, the centralized process also gave the organization a consolidated record of how discount decisions were made over time. Approval history, exceptions, and outcomes are now accessible in one place, allowing teams to review patterns more consistently, discuss edge cases with shared context, and reduce reliance on informal judgment.

Conclusion

This project shows how discount governance can be strengthened through careful design rather than additional manual controls. By aligning policies, workflows, and decision roles into a single approval model, the organization moved from fragmented processes toward clearer oversight, more consistent execution, and a foundation that can evolve as approval needs grow.

Talk to us if you’re exploring better ways to improve visibility, alignment, and decision-making across complex initiatives.

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Kitameraki (www.kitameraki.com) is the trusted partner for comprehensive IT Consulting and IT services in Indonesia. With strong focus on IT Solutions, Web Development, Mobile App Development, and Cloud Solutions, we help businesses navigate the ever-evolving digital landscape. Our expertise extends to Cloud Services, Cloud Migration, Data Analytics, Big Data, Business Intelligence, Data Science, and Cybersecurity.