Your company's authority is real only where it is granted, cascading from the board to the chief executive and chief financial officer, then to plant managers and the people who sign supplier contracts. Approving a capital project, committing a purchase order, and signing a supplier agreement are different authorities that rarely sit at the same level. Spread across plants and corporate in spreadsheets and signed memos, that authority has no single current answer to the question every auditor and supplier relationship depends on: who is authorized to approve, sign, and commit on behalf of this company today, and up to what limit? Aptly holds that answer as one live, audit-ready system across every plant, every entity, and every supplier.
Delegation of authority (DOA) is the formal structure that defines who can approve, sign, and commit on behalf of a manufacturer, up to what limit, and under what conditions. In manufacturing, that structure has to hold across every plant, every legal entity, and every supplier agreement. The authority is documented across plants and corporate, and current nowhere. Manufacturing runs on delegated authority, and most companies have written it down: a board policy that reserves major capital, a delegation-of-authority matrix that sets approval limits, and signatory lists for the people who bind the company to suppliers. The problem is not that the authority is undefined. The problem is that it lives in spreadsheets and signed memos, held by different plants and corporate functions, updated on different cycles, and impossible to see as one current picture when it matters. In more than a quarter of organizations (28%), the delegation of authority does not address who is permitted to sign at all.
Approving, committing, and signing authority get conflated. Approving a capital project is not the authority to commit the capital, and committing the spend is not the authority to sign the supplier agreement. People act on the wrong one, and the company finds out during a controls walkthrough rather than before a signature.
Plant and corporate limits drift apart. A plant manager's limit is set at corporate, but the spreadsheet at the plant, the matrix in finance, and the signatory list at each subsidiary fall out of step as roles change, plants reorganize, and limits move. The same purchase can be in-authority on one record and out of authority on another.
The picture is reconstructed, not maintained. When an external auditor samples a capital expenditure, or a supplier asks who is authorized to sign, the answer is assembled by hand from delegation memos and email, often months after the commitment was made.
86%
Only 14% of organizations embed delegation of authority within an IT system. The other 86% keep it as a document, most often on the company intranet, where it goes out of date the moment a role changes.A policy on paper is not the same as a live record of who held that authority on a given date. In manufacturing, that drift is expensive: a capital project approved above a plant manager's limit, a supplier or purchase order committed past a delegated threshold, or a contract signed by someone the entity had not authorized, each surfaces in an audit rather than before the commitment is made.
Between who people are and where the work happens. Your identity system governs the door: it knows who someone is and what they can sign into. Aptly governs the decision once they are through it. Your enterprise systems, the ERP and finance platform, the procurement and sourcing systems, and the contract and signing tools, are where commitments actually get made. Neither identity nor those systems knows what a person is authorized to approve, commit, or sign on behalf of the company, and up to what limit. That authority lives in board policy, delegation matrices, and signatory lists, outside every system that needs it.
Aptly is the authority layer that sits between the two. It holds the company's delegated authority as a live model: who holds approval and signing authority, for what, up to what limit and under what conditions, with each delegation's source resolution or letter attached and each recipient's acceptance recorded. Connected to your ERP and finance platform and your identity directory, Aptly keeps that authority aligned with organizational reality as roles, limits, plants, and people change, so the function routing an approval and the person about to sign a supplier contract always work from what the company actually authorized.
One source of truth, a clear chain of authority
Holds authority by charter and bylaws. Reserves key matters, delegates the rest.
Receives the board's omnibus delegation, then sub-delegates by formal instrument.
Capital expenditure and treasury; capital-commitment authority above the plant limit.
The plant network and capital planning across plants.
Contract execution and review; dual approval on capital above a set figure.
Plant operating and capital authority within delegated limits.
Authorized to sign supplier contracts, purchase orders, and master agreements against the entity signatory list.
Separate legal entities, one model
Four capabilities, one system of record. Built for the CFO, corporate controller, and internal audit teams accountable for it.
The obligations that make current authority non-negotiable. These obligations do not all sit in one office, and they do not pause between audits. Each one assumes the company can show who was authorized to act, and on what date. The effect is that SOX testing becomes a lookup rather than a reconstruction: the authority that stood on the approval date is retrievable in its exact form, with the actor and the prior value on every change. Aptly maps your authority model to what each one requires:
A plant manager at Meridian Pacific needs to commit $2.8M for a new production line. The plant manager's own approval limit is $250,000. The project need is approved at the plant, and that approval is recorded. In Aptly, the authority model shows what that approval is and is not: it sponsors the project, but it is not authority to commit the capital or sign the contract.
Two years later, SOX 404 testing asks who was authorized to approve and sign on the commitment date. Aptly recalls exactly who held approval and signing authority on the date the capital was committed, with the delegation behind it, in one place rather than a reconstruction from spreadsheets and email.
Use case
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Bring two or three plants or entities and the authority each one holds. We'll show you the single, live, audit-ready view Aptly produces, using your own authority data.
