Customer Stories Jan 15, 2026 · 9 min read · PlugIQ Team

From Email to Automated: How an Energy Company Rebuilt Its Field Authorization Workflow

A real story about replacing a manual, email-driven field approval process with something that actually works.

The Starting Point

A mid-sized Nigerian energy company with field operations across three states came to PlugIQ with a specific problem: their field authorization workflow was running entirely on email, costing them in delays, compliance gaps, and operational risk.

The Cost of the Old Process

  • Average time from authorization request to approval: 2.1 days for routine work, 4.6 days for high-risk activities.
  • Roughly 30% of authorizations had incomplete documentation.
  • During a recent regulatory audit, the HSE team spent three days manually reconstructing authorization records from email threads across multiple inboxes.

The Outcome

Sixty days after go-live: average authorization time for routine work dropped from 2.1 days to 3.8 hours. High-risk authorization time dropped from 4.6 days to 11 hours. Documentation completeness reached 98%.

“We spent years trying to fix this with better email discipline,” the HSE Manager told us. “It turns out discipline was not the problem. The system was the problem.”

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