I work in pharma, and our biggest bottleneck is drafting and executing service agreements and statements of work with new vendors. A system to facilitate this workflow would be amazing (document templates, a queue for requests with weekly status updates, etc.)
Of course there is manual work done by Legal that can't be easily automated, but that is just one component of the bottleneck.
I work at a gov't organization and was going to say the same thing. It recently took me two months to get an $11/month pingdom account. There is some office somewhere that has to read the TOS and put the vendor on an "approved" list. They never use credit cards, and have to call the vendor (even for small webapps) to get bank routing numbers. Also, no recurring payments are allowed, they must be able to pay one lump sum. By the time I get an account the vendor already hates me.
hentrap - msg or email me. I've been itching to create a new project that also solves a huge/real pain. I'd really like to hear your workflow steps in detail. Here's a temp email I setup if you want to reach out: hn@robodale.33mail.com (removed public mailinator email per mbrookes advice)
I should also add that my wife is a clinical pharmacist who regularly creates infectious disease drug protocols for multiple 'big pharma' companies. Pretty sure she can help me round out any domain knowledge gaps I might have.
hentrep, my startup solves this exactly and we are now live at three Fortune 1,000 firms. Previously, I was a healthcare consultant with mckinsey so I understand the unique challenges in pharma. I would love to chat. Feel free to ping me at jl@thevetted.com.
Of course there is manual work done by Legal that can't be easily automated, but that is just one component of the bottleneck.