Designing Workflows
Planning
It is always important to plan in order to save time, re-work and errors due to incorrect starting assumptions. Before starting to put a process together, be sure that all pieces of the puzzle are known and understood. Ask yourself if you are automating a process or trying to solve a problem. If you see or experience an actual breakdown in the efficiency of the current process, then you should first solve the problem before automating the process.
Be sure to contact all team members who will be affected by the automation:
- Department managers - They know the purpose of a process, and who handles what parts. May also be able to identify external contacts if those exist.
- Team members - They deal with the process in detail, and can help prevent missed steps or details.
- Upper management - There may be something that they need from, or would like to add to, an existing process that is not immediately discernible.
Diagram the existing process with a flow diagram. Review the diagram with the team to make sure that everything is captured.
Designing
Using the diagram, determine where and when decisions happen, what activities are needed, and what data is involved in the process.
Build the workflow based on those determinations. There are many pre-designed activities within workflows to handle a multitude of actions, decision trees, and deadlines for action. As the workflow is built, test as needed to make sure that any complicated process is completed as expected.
Design section details:
Workflow example videos:
Workflow makes applying a standard naming convention in your repository a breeze. The workflow in this video renames documents based on two of their field values.
Watch the videoThis workflow runs behind the scenes and ensures that if the metadata on a folder changes, the metadata on the entries in the folder will also be automatically updated.
This workflow finds related documents and automatically creates a document relationship link between them.
To avoid moving documents around the repository, we recommend providing users with shortcuts to the document. This workflow creates three shortcuts to a document and distributes those shortcuts to various folders.
See Also:
Free Training: Building a Basic Workflow in Laserfiche Cloud eLearning course in Aspire.