As we highlighted time and time again, to achieve great quality, we need to make this an organization-wide effort. With more and more people getting involved, manual processes become a bigger burden that requires some smart tooling.
Having discussed AlisQI’s adjustable form templates that save time with QESH registrations, it makes sense to dive deeper into this topic and introduce automated workflows. Workflows keep processes organized by helping users stay in control and steering them towards action. Let’s find out more!
Go with the (work)flow
When creating a workflow in AlisQI, QESH managers set up step-by-step protocols and follow-up actions. Doing this, they determine when notifications should be sent, who should be informed, and what changes need to be implemented per QESH registration.
For example, once someone submits a form that records a near miss incident, the QESH Manager is automatically informed via email. He/she can then assign an owner to follow up on the incident to prevent it from happening again.
This 3-step (submit form, assign owner, complete follow up) workflow is a very simple example. Workflows can also consist of an entire chain of follow-up actions, bringing departments together to implement changes. No matter how many parts they consist of, workflows connect the right people with relevant data, keeping improvement top-of-mind.
Tailored workflows with well-defined triggers
Our QESH management software directs your teams according to the workflows defined by you. Creating a workflow can be done by answering three important questions:
- When? First and foremost, you need to establish the conditions for initiating a workflow. Frequent triggers can be form submissions, result changes, completed evaluations, etc. Triggers on date fields can work great as reminders, of for example, the planned finish date of a preventive action.
- Who? A second obvious step is to decide who will be notified once the workflow is initiated. AlisQI allows you to easily select recipients based on a pre-defined selection list, by inserting their email addresses or importing recipients from other lists in your form.
- What? Each workflow can include different kinds of signals. Here you can think of popup notifications, custom alarms (only available to users who are assigned), and webhooks (which trigger subsequent events or processes in external systems). Like with any email, you would use the fields Subject and Message to describe the follow-up actions needed to complete the workflow. You can also attach pictures and link to relevant documents.
Workflows, result transfers and advanced calculations
As part of a workflow, AlisQI users can perform result transfers. This means that they can send the data or part of the data entered in a form (referred to as results) to another form. So, whether you’re sending a result within Form A to Form B which is either new or needs its results updated, this option saves time and prevents double work.
When updating results in one form with data from another, identification is in order. To better understand the role of this, let’s look at an example: imagine the form Production Orders and the form Final Product Inspections, that stores quality test results of those orders. When a quality test has been performed and the ordeal is that all is OK for PO 123 within Final Product Inspections, the status is set to ‘Released’. The form Final Product Inspections will send the ‘Released’ status data (including PO 123) to the form Production Orders. In the form Production Orders, we will then only need the record of that very PO 123 order to be updated, since this is the only order for which we validated quality. So, our result transfer is defined by a unique identifier (PO in this example).
Sometimes you do not simply want to send over data right away because you may need to transform that data before sending it. The advanced calculations engine is a toolkit that enables users just that. Take for example, a field that contains a date+time value, but you only need the date part of it. With the help of the advanced calculation engine, you can transform this to only include the date. And this is just one of the endless use cases for the advanced calculation engine in the workflow result transfers.
More benefits to be gained
Designing their own workflows, AlisQI users save time, prevent double work, and manage to stay action oriented. However, a modern, integrated Quality Management system is designed to improve performance in multiple ways. This short video gives you a quick intro of AlisQI’s flexibility and user-friendliness. Schedule a demo to better understand how you can make QESH actionable and boost your quality management.
