The performance issues seem to be primarily driven by the complexity of the process and the number of stakeholders involved. Some potential root causes include:

  * The large number of stakeholders (i.e. employee vs supervisor vs administrator) means that each step in the process must be well-documented, reviewed, and approved by many different parties, which can increase the overall time required to complete a task.
  * The sequential nature of the approval process also increases the potential for delays due to approvals taking longer than expected or missing, since not all stakeholders may have completed their review by the next step in the process.
  * The need for multiple steps and approvals means that there can be more opportunities for errors or miscommunications between parties involved.
  * Finally, the need to manually track and update progress throughout the process can lead to inefficiencies and additional work.

Overall, improving process efficiency would involve reducing the number of stakeholders involved in the approval process, streamlining steps to make them easier to complete, automating approvals where possible, and improving communication between stakeholders.