DAISY starts with a regulated approval workflow and improves it with governed AI. Manual processes depend on inboxes, spreadsheets, shared drives, and individual officer memory.
This is the baseline comparison for councils still running approvals manually. The real question is whether the team wants to keep coordinating work by habit or move to a visible, measurable, auditable workflow.
See how DAISY and Manual Paper Processes differ across the criteria below.
| Criterion | DAISY | Manual Paper Processes |
|---|---|---|
| Better for... | Councils that need consistent, auditable development assessment from intake through decision. | Low-volume teams willing to keep coordinating work manually and accept uneven visibility. |
| Where it starts | A structured submission, governed workflow, and clear assessment stages. | Email inboxes, paper files, spreadsheets, and shared folders. |
| Who owns rollout? | The planning or regulatory service owner with explicit handoffs and escalation points. | Individual officers and local team habits. |
| First result | Cleaner intake, fewer avoidable RFIs, and a visible queue before backlog grows. | No new software project and no immediate process redesign. |
| Main trade-off | Requires a rollout and change discipline, but creates control, evidence, and repeatability. | Looks cheaper at first, but work stays opaque, fragile, and hard to defend. |
Short context behind the main tradeoffs in the table.
Manual routing and completeness checks add delay before the statutory work begins.
The history of a case often lives in email, folders, and spreadsheets instead of one operational record.
Teams can keep moving for a while, but the process becomes harder to scale, defend, and improve.
A short set of questions buyers usually ask after the table.
Because manual handling is still the default competitor in many approval teams. It is the real baseline for cost, speed, and auditability.
No. It gives planners a cleaner intake, clearer workflow, and better operating evidence. Judgment still stays with the team.
Most teams see earlier gains in intake quality and queue visibility before the broader cycle-time improvements show up.
Join hundreds of organizations that have upgraded from Manual Paper Processes