My company has a well established paper process that depending on the amount and reason for the adjustment can include up to 4 signatures in order for that adjustment to be authorized to be performed.
This approach had the following shortcomings:
1) Paper gets lost - does not provide feedback without prompting someone to stop doing what they are doing and go track it down.
2) Requires additional overhead to move it around.
3) if an exception occurs, or some other type of wrinkle occur the process breaks down
4) Not everyone does it the same way
5) No reporting support other than a derived report from the system that does not supply the who's and when's from the process
We instituted a SharePoint list (migrating to infopath in the near term) where the requests could be made that Nintex subsequently routes through the byzantine set of approval rules. This did few things...(not all inclusive but some of the more interesting things)
1) Made us scratch our heads at this process, and ask questions like, "is all this really necessary?
2) provide an automated paperless means to accomplish the same task
3) Provide instrumentation so that we can now report things such as out of "X" requests, we reject "X%" whereas before this information was annecdotal at best.
This was all done by a non-it person in the finance department that has little or no formal technical training....technically oriented, but not a true tech.
Other than some funky internal network glitches the process has been low maintenance and does what it does well. Has earned a good reputation w/in the company, I expect we will do more and more of these types of things in the future.