The RPA vendor demo showed clean order intake, inventory checks and dispatch notifications all inside one flow. What it never showed was the payment approval step that still routes through the legacy finance system requiring two named authorisers to click inside a separate portal.
Your supply chain director approved the rollout after the pilot hit 200 simulated orders. Real production runs exposed the gap within a week when the first batch of invoices sat untouched because the bot had no path to request or receive those signatures.
Procurement teams had already locked the contract around transaction volume metrics. The agreement contains no clause for reworking the approval logic, so every stalled payment now triggers a manual workaround that the operations team must maintain outside the platform.
Finance refuses to expose the approval API because the current controls sit on a 15-year-old ERP module with no audit trail for automated calls. The RPA team responds by adding another desktop script that screenshots the approval screen and emails it, recreating the exact handoff failure the project was meant to remove.
Monthly steering reports still list the original 85 percent figure because the metric only counts orders that reach dispatch. The finance queue backlog grows quietly and only surfaces when quarter-end cash flow reports arrive two weeks late.
The pattern repeats across any process where a financial or compliance gate sits outside the primary workflow tool. Bots handle the visible steps; humans absorb the invisible ones, and the reported automation rate stays disconnected from actual cycle time.