New Feature Focus: Workflow
With software, and especially sales-style software, there is a cause-and-effect that goes on. You make a phone call and create an activity, and there is another, followup activity that needs to be created to remind you to call again in two weeks. Or when you place someone on an order for the first time, you need to email them with information. Or perhaps when you change an applicant to “inactive” you want to remove them from your Favorites list.
With the new workflow system in Humanis 8.1, these things can all be done automatically, without needing to manually create them! We provide adminsitrators with the ability to customize the actions that take place when an event happens. Examples of events are creating a new applicant, adding a job order, making a placement, or filling an order. There are about two dozen events you can respond to!
You respond to these events with actions, and Humanis provides four standard actions:
- Create an activity. This is the most common action, allowing you to add new activities as a response to an event. For example, you may need to create several activities to follow up on job orders, or you might want to create a sales activity after adding a new prospect.
- Send an email. There are lots of ways that emailing people can help you: notifying internal staff members of changes to orders (such as notifying managers when an order is filled, or letting consultants know when a new order is placed), or contacting applicants with a welcome message, or job order details, or thanking a client for their first order… the list goes on.
- Generate a report. Sometimes you want to produce printed output as a result of an event: printing an order once it’s closed, or printing out an applicant summary when they’re entered. Or, maybe you want to email a PDF of the report to a manager or a client. All of this is possible with this action.
- Run an SQL Script. For advanced, uncommon actions, an SQL script can run as the result of an event. This can add, remove or modify information in other areas of Humanis.
One of the best parts about this is how easy it is to create new workflow actions. A simple dialog box allows you to select the event you want to handle, and add as many actions as you’d like to it. Each action has a lot of options you can set, but it’s all point-and-click, so you don’t need to know anything in order to set them all properly.
Some examples of things you can do:
- When a client places an order for the first time, send an email to the president notifying them of this. Also, send another email to the client, letting them know that the order is placed and what to expect. Additionally, an activity is created to call the client on the day before the order starts to remind them about the placement, and finally another activity is created to follow up with the client the day after the order is completed, to make sure everything went well.
- When a “Phone Call” type activity is marked as completed, prompt to create a new activity to follow it up.
- When an applicant is placed on an order, email them with information about the order, based on an email template. Also, create an activity to phone them the day before the order starts, to remind them about it
Literally, the options are endless. You can prompt to verify the workflow action should happen, or you can just do it in the background without any interference from the user, or you can mix and match, so some things just happen and others require prompting.
I should stress that this isn’t something we hope to get into v8.1 — it’s something that’s already in 8.1, so you’ll see this when it’s released. (To stave any questions: we will not announce a release date for 8.1 in order to control quality. I’ll write a post about this very soon, to explain why).
Depending on where you are, have a great Fourth of July weekend, or a great Canada Day weekend!