One of the cornerstones of Donesafe is the ability to automate your safety. As the platform has expanded, so too has the complexity of workflows and automations needed. Because of this, we decided to go back to rethink workflows and rebuild something visual, simplified, and far more flexible.
We introduce to you…
At a glance, you can already see the level of configurability you can achieve with this beautiful new drag and drop flow builder. Multi branching and complex workflows are now not only possible, but shockingly easy to configure. To enable you the most amount of control as possible, you can adjust settings for not only the workflow state but also the link between states.
Using an interplay between these elements for every step you can control:
Now some of these abilities were possible before, but to get it working comfortably was far too difficult and it was far too easy to make a mistake. The majority of these abilities though; are brand spanking new and combining them gives you a huge amount of control. It also opens up the door for users to experiment and come up with their own uses of the system. For example, in just a few minutes, I set up a looping workflow state that could be used to send a Knowledge Base article to everyone in a certain organization every time the state is “Re-Broadcast” (see below).
This is the beauty of this new system; it’s so configurable and powerful that we can’t even begin to predict how admins will choose to use it and the fun and clever things they’ll come up with. SO, get in there and play. If you’re worried about breaking anything, you can use an inactive module to experiment with. And of course, if you get stuck or have any requests or suggestions, just jump over to support. It’ll be a short while before we get formal tutorial materials for this new system, so feel free to pick our brains if you get stuck (ask for Chris.)
Next, let’s take a look at…
So, if you’re familiar with Donesafe you may be wondering; doesn’t donesafe already HAVE an automations engine? Yes, Donesafe has ‘Action Tracks’. In the short term, we’re leaving both Action Tracks and Automations active until we’re certain that the new automations engine covers all our bases. We’ll be moving to phase out Actions Tracks in favor of Automations over time.
So why the change?
As with workflows, the needs of our clients were starting to outstretch the capabilities of the old ‘Action Tracks’ engine. Action tracks had become clunky as we added more things to it which made it both confusing and difficult to manage. SO, we went back to the start and built something awesome.
Using the new ‘Automations’ tool you can now:
The end goal of this system will be to replace all hardcoded automations in Donesafe with something a user can configure; it’s not there yet, but this step was needed to be taken in order to get there. For now, it’s a highly powerful and highly configurable system that will take your automations to the next level.
Remember; don’t do anything a computer can do.
Next up, let’s take a look at it…
The user collections system is altogether a new part of Donesafe. It’s here that you set your user ‘Collections’ that you were able to choose from in both Workflows and Automations. What is a user collection? Well, let’s say that as part of an automation, you would like to send a notification to all Managers in Pyrmont. “All Managers in Pyrmont” is a user collection.
User collections are now created in a centralized location; “User Collections”; and are then useable throughout the platform. User Collections use exactly the same AND/OR builder you saw above and give you far greater control over your user groups.
Once a user group is created, you’ll be able to select it when editing your workflows as well as creating automations or schedules.
Which leads us to our final addition, introducing…
The Scheduler is another brand new feature of Donesafe and allows you to set up repeating scheduled record creations within the platforms. These repeat records can be either Actions, Audits, Observations or Consultations.
We’ve built this in because we began to see a demand for repeat and regular audits in the system. For example, it may be a requirement of an organization for all Workers in Adelaide that drive company cars to need to fill in a fortnightly safety audit of their vehicles. Guess what? You can do that now!
Making them do it every two weeks is a little mean, but the frequency is totally up to you. ;).
When you create a schedule, Donesafe will automatically create records, whether they be Audits/Observations/Actions/Consultations, and assign them to those that need to complete it.
For the time being, you’ll need to set up your notifications for these assignments separately using ‘Automations’, but in the long run, we’ll be trying these two systems together.
As always, you can access these settings from the Setting section of Donesafe.
For workflows, go to Settings > Modules then chose the module you’d like to set up.
For everything else, from settings at the bottom of the top section you’ll see three new buttons:
Phew, that’s a lot of new stuff. Once again, using these four systems now gives you the unprecedented capacity to automate your safety and compliance management. In the long run, we’ll be combining these four systems into one much larger automations platform as well as adding things like dynamic locations, dynamic organizations, and form fill fields to name a few.
Already though, if you’ve got the desire to automate away a bunch of your compliance activity; you guessed it; you can do that now.