Workflows and Automations are getting a MASSIVE upgrade. AND Introducing: The Scheduler

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…

The new workflow builder:

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:

• Who has the right to edit records within each individual state?
  These rights override rights given by Roles. Why does this matter? Let’s say your employees need to fill in a monthly audit and you want to allow them to create the audit and submit it BUT not change their answers once they’re done. You can do this now.
  
• Who has the right to CHANGE the workflow state and to what? You might decide that you want your workers to only be able to advance the workflow state to a particular point and then from then on a manager is required to complete the process. So, for example, if you’ve got an injury management record, you might want the employee affected to be able to upload medical certificates, but NOT be able to advance the state. You most certainly can do that now.
  
• Under what conditions a workflow state can be advanced. Let’s say when an employee submits an incident it’s a requirement of your organization that they add people involved to the record before submitting… yep; you can do that now. What’s more, with the new workflow interface on records, you can even provide instructions as to what needs to be completed before that user can advance.
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  (Click on the actual link to edit the link settings)
  
• Which workflow branches are shown based on record criteria. Let’s say that you have two distinct processes around safety incident reports and health incident reports, but everything else follows a generic process. You can now set up different branches and only show the relevant ones when certain criteria are met, in this example, if the record is marked as a “Safety” record the user will only be shown the workflow branch you’ve set up for Safety incidents. This means, that you could set up a highly complex workflow with tens of branches to cover your internal processes; but the people actually using it will only see options relevant to them. From their perspective, there’s one process and they’re following it. This makes workflows super-flexible from a business perspective, but also super-easy and obvious for the end-user.
  
• Choose who and under what conditions a state may be rejected. You can now choose who’s allowed to reject and under what circumstances. So you might have it so that anybody can advance in the workflow, but only managers are allowed to reject OR reject under certain circumstances.

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…

The New Automations Engine

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:

• Use And/Or logic to set your action triggers.
  Picture if you will that you would only like this action to trigger if The workflow step is equal to “Ready for Investigation” and the type is equal to “Safety OR a nobody has been added as a person involved. You can do that now.
  I mean, you probably wouldn’t do that, but the point is; you can if you want to. As with the new workflow interface, this new system has been designed to empower users to mold Donesafe in a fashion that suits them using a beautiful AND/OR logic set. This is an expanding system so new trigger types will be added over time. We’re open to suggestions, so send them in through support!
  

• Send actions to who you want, without the risk of spamming everyone. The AND/OR builder you see above can also be applied to recipients of those actions. So, if you’d like to do anything more complicated than notifying the creator’s manager you can now do this, and you can do this easily. Let’s say for example you’d like to create an action to the Manager of Pyrmont but only if they’re either in the Accounting or Vandelay Industries organizations; you can do that now. We’ll go into that a little deeper when we take a look at the ‘User Collections’, but for now, just know that it’s possible.
• Send actions to one or many, and easily choose who they go to.
  Choose from a long list of action recipients or set up your own user collections. Send just one action or send it to a whole group of specially selected users. If you’ve used ‘Action Tracks’ some of this will feel familiar, but with an extra element of control and configurability; especially around user groups.

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…

User Collections

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

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.  

Where to find these settings.

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:

What’s coming next?

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.

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