ARKcelerate Customer Approvals module: a walkthrough

The video above walks through the ARKcelerate Customer Approvals module — the part of the system that manages customer drawing approvals for project-based and engineered-to-order manufacturers. Instead of drawings living in email threads and revisions in shared folders, every drawing, revision and customer response sits on the project, where the system can act on it.

The problem: approvals live in email

In most ERPs, customer approvals are an afterthought. Drawings get emailed back and forth, comments sit in someone’s inbox, and nobody can say which revision is in front of the customer or how long it has been there. The cost shows up later as a slipped schedule — and on engineered-to-order work, where the approved drawing gates the whole job, that is expensive.

How ARKcelerate handles it

Every drawing and revision tracked, with an owner

Apply a document checklist to a project and every deliverable — GA drawing, calcs, ITP, QAP, data book and the rest — sits on the project, each with its own responsible engineer. Every revision records when it went out, what the customer said, and what happens next, so alerts and auto-tasks always land with the person actually accountable.

Overdue flagged both ways — automatically

The module watches both sides of the clock. When a customer sits on a submitted drawing past the no-response threshold (15 days by default), the row flags red. When the customer returns comments and the drawing is not resubmitted within the resubmission window (7 days by default), it flags red too — and a task is auto-raised for the responsible engineer the moment those comments land, with a notification, so nothing is rediscovered in a status meeting.

Approved with comments, handled honestly

A clean Approved is the only true green light. “Approved with Comments” is treated like comments — it starts the same resubmission clock, raises the same task, and does not count toward manufacturing clearance. The system never lets an approved-with-comments drawing quietly clear production.

From clearance to a dispatch date

Flag the drawings that gate manufacturing as clearance documents. When every clearance document is cleanly approved, ARKcelerate stamps the manufacturing clearance date and calculates the dispatch deadline from the project’s lead time — so the factory gets a hard date the instant the drawing is signed, tied all the way back to what sales committed to.

And a read on the team behind it

Engineers log their work — drawings prepared, revisions, customer meetings, comment-resolution sheets — which feeds a leaderboard and a team-performance view that flags a drafter whose output is quietly dropping, before it becomes a missed drawing. Customer Approvals is one of fourteen modules in ARKcelerate, all tied together by the project.