Discover FlowForma's app for Microsoft Teams

Conor McGrath00:01

Hi everyone, I hope you're all keeping well, and thanks for joining our webinar today: Discover FlowForma's App for Microsoft Teams. We'll show how it supercharges video calls and instant messaging to support task and process management, informed decision making and collaborative process execution. My name is Conor McGrath, and I'll be your host.

Conor McGrath00:25

A few housekeeping tips. If you have any issues during the webinar, please email info@flowforma.com. Your lines are muted, but please use the Q&A function to ask questions and we'll get to them at the end. Today's webinar is being recorded.

Conor McGrath00:52

I'm delighted to be joined by my FlowForma colleagues Paul Stone, our product strategist, and David Shanley, process consultant. Welcome, guys. I'll hand you straight over to Paul, who's going to talk a bit about FlowForma to begin with.

Paul Stone01:15

Thanks, Conor. Before we jump into Teams, a little background on what FlowForma is. It's a system that lets you digitize business processes that involve many people working together to achieve business goals. You take processes that currently run on paper, emails and spreadsheets and turn them into digital processes that drive resources toward those goals in a predictable, structured manner, with a full audit trail.

Paul Stone01:51

FlowForma combines several things in one package. Workflow, which is the execution of tasks in a predictable manner. Data capture through forms, all the way through the workflow, so it can be analyzed later. And document generation and document management. All three are combined in a single tool designed for business developers, so business people can configure processes and deliver them into the business, with an award-winning interface that makes those processes easy to adopt.

Paul Stone02:42

FlowForma runs on top of Office 365. It's native to Office 365, and it saves all that data and all those documents in SharePoint, using SharePoint as the back end. Now it also interfaces with Microsoft Teams, which is the main discussion point today.

Paul Stone03:06

The big advantages: it's very fast, so you can digitize processes at record speed. It's intuitive, so end users adopt processes quickly. It's affordable: you can start small and grow big. It's no-code, so business developers build the processes. And it's agile: if you push something out and get negative feedback, you can change it very quickly. We're constantly evolving the product and responding to the market, which is one of the reasons we've entered the Teams marketplace.

Paul Stone03:56

We're a Microsoft Gold partner and have won awards from Microsoft for usability. Forrester included us as a strong performer in its wave for business developers. We're revolutionizing the BPM space, which was traditionally full of products that were complex to configure and use. We have a presence in over 20 countries, from New Zealand to the west coast of the US, and over 200,000 people using FlowForma throughout the world.

Paul Stone04:46

The solution isn't aimed at any specific market, type of company or business problem. Everybody has processes, and everybody has paper-based processes they need to automate. For example, Aon uses FlowForma for contractor insurance, Marsh uses it for risk analysis, and Inland Rail, one of the largest construction projects in Australia, uses it for sustainability. Every client finds a use for FlowForma, regardless of their sector.

Paul Stone05:26

So why did we launch the FlowForma app for Microsoft Teams? We're a tool that's all about collaboration and business process, and you might think there's quite an overlap with Teams. But the truth is, as people work in Teams, their work is often unstructured. FlowForma adds structure to that work to make it more productive and help people achieve their business goals.

Paul Stone05:54

When people collaborate in Teams, whether through a chat or by editing documents in a channel, you can associate that activity with the workflow and record it as progress against the business goal. It makes collaboration more productive and measures its effect.

Paul Stone06:18

It also keeps you aware of your changing workload. The FlowForma Teams app has a dashboard that tells you what tasks are on your to-do list right now, and you can start workflows to involve other people in the organization. You want the work you're doing to be coordinated across the business toward your objectives.

Paul Stone06:53

As you achieve those goals, it's important to measure them. Are you on time? Are things running late? Have you hit a blocker in your process? FlowForma lets you see that and relate it directly to your activity in Teams. Especially now, with the COVID outbreak and everybody working at their kitchen tables, it's important to align remote work with business goals and keep people as productive as they were at their desks.

Paul Stone07:38

Let's switch over to a demonstration. My colleague David Shanley is going to carry that out. Over to you, David.

David Shanley07:43

Thank you, Paul. What you're looking at is the dashboard of the FlowForma app on SharePoint, within your Office 365 tenancy, and it's here that I built the process we're going to showcase. These tiles are pre-built processes you can start as an end user, and the one we'll work with is a tender response process. Further down there are filtered views, such as forms awaiting my input, or forms awaiting CCO approval.

David Shanley08:44

Now I'm moving into Teams to show you how the process gets started using the FlowForma app. Here's the app's icon, and its dashboard bears a strong resemblance to the one on SharePoint. You can see the processes you can start, and the work waiting for your attention: here, 12 forms awaiting my input.

David Shanley09:18

Let's start the tender response process from within Teams by clicking its tile. A quick word on the form: the header can be customized with your logo and the process name. The step bar underneath shows the current step in white, then the following steps, CCO approval, technical review and so on, so whatever step you're on you get a strong sense of where you sit in the overall process. I can save my progress and come back to it, or submit and push it forward.

David Shanley09:52

So I'll key in some information. The company is Acme, the tender is for air conditioning, the contact is John Smith, with his email address and contact number, and the tender reference.

David Shanley10:34

When I click this button, Create a Teams channel, it automatically creates that channel in Teams for me. A business rule has also revealed a hidden question asking me to upload the tender response document the channel will work on, so I'll upload it from my desktop and save my progress.

David Shanley11:14

Let me take you into Teams to show you what just happened. There's a new channel, and in its Files tab is the document we'll work on as a team. We can collaborate on it from within Teams and chat to each other as we work through it.

David Shanley11:46

Back in the FlowForma dashboard in Teams, I'll open forms awaiting my input. The form we're working on is TR-47. I'll set the tender deadline, 31 August, and submit. It moves to Paul, who owns the CCO approval step.

Paul Stone12:57

Thanks, David. I'm going into my CCO approvals to pick up the form David just submitted. Here's TR-47. When I open it, the information from the first step is carried forward, so I can review the detail and decide whether to approve it. I'll say yes and submit, and it moves forward.

Paul Stone13:35

Back in the Teams app, you'll see the awaiting CCO approval count has gone back to one, because TR-47 has moved on to a new stage. Back to you, David.

David Shanley13:54

Thank you, Paul. Back in the FlowForma Teams app, TR-47 is in forms awaiting my input, and it opens on my step, the technical review. I'm happy to proceed, so I'll submit, and since I own the next step too we move straight into it.

David Shanley14:42

Now I assign the tender to the people who'll work on it: myself and Paul. This table lets you break the document down by pages. Pages one to four are mine, five to six are Paul's, and seven to eight are mine again, with a comment that the tender has to be done in English.

David Shanley15:29

Notice two steps have appeared in the step bar, task one and task two. They're slightly smaller than the others because they can be worked on in parallel. The process picks up that there are only two assignees, so when each of us opens our step, the table is filtered to show only the content assigned to us.

David Shanley16:08

When I submit, it moves into that parallel set of steps. I'm on task one, and I'll save my progress, because we have a month to do this and we'll be working on the documents through Teams. I go into Teams, into the channel we created for this tender, open the document in my desktop app and start working on it. Paul does the same.

David Shanley17:21

On page seven there's the instruction about the tender being submitted in English, so I change that portion. I can dip in and out of this, message Paul in Teams and share our expertise. You can see Paul keying in information at the same time, so we can both work on the document at once.

David Shanley18:07

Let's say we've been working on it for a month and it's finally complete. I go back to the FlowForma app in Teams, open my form from forms awaiting my input, and submit my step. Paul submits his.

David Shanley19:22

Once both steps are submitted, it moves to the last step in the process, the CEO approval. The CEO can click back through all the previous steps, look at the content submitted in the document and decide whether to approve. If they don't, they can request an amendment, choose who owns that task, and add comments. When they submit, it passes back to my step with the comments embedded, and I can edit the document again.

David Shanley20:17

The documents can be edited through the form in the browser or through the FlowForma app in Microsoft Teams. Either way, it lets you work on a document collaboratively over a long period, exchange your expertise and knowledge, and get through it much more quickly and efficiently.

Paul Stone20:48

So that was our Teams app with a simple use case, a tender response. FlowForma interacted with Teams by creating a channel and uploading a document into it, and as people worked on that document, the work was associated with the workflow and its progress recorded.

Paul Stone21:13

There are other interactions too. You could work in Teams first, creating a channel and uploading documents, and then kick off a workflow and associate that channel and those documents with it: the other way around from what we showed. You can also post messages into a Teams channel, so the conversation history in Teams sits alongside the workflow. You get the best of both worlds: all of Teams' conversation and document sharing, plus the workflow you get with FlowForma.

Paul Stone22:14

The dashboard is the key piece, because it always lets you know your workload. You can see the steps and processes assigned to you and access them quickly. All the work you do through a workflow moves you toward your business goal, and you can see how far you've progressed. You can coordinate work between team members in a structured, automated way: as a task is completed it's passed on, and the next person gets a notification in Teams.

Paul Stone23:00

All the information you capture on the workflow is tracked in the background and stored in SharePoint, so you can report on it, keep track of progress and identify bottlenecks. Because you're linking both the data and the documents to the workflow, you have the key information in the right place at the right time to make better decisions. Those decisions are recorded in the workflow and the audit trail, which you can report on.

Paul Stone24:02

At the end of the day, FlowForma helps you stay productive while working remotely. In an office you can call over to someone, or catch them at the coffee spot, and you lose all of that when you're remote. FlowForma keeps some structure in your activity, so you keep moving toward your business goals.

Conor McGrath24:40

Thanks, guys. Before we jump into questions, you might be interested in our new white paper, Why Digitization Is No Longer an Option, which you can get from our website. The first question, maybe for David: can you access any site in your tenancy?

David Shanley25:10

In short, yes. The app prompts you with a list of the sites you can access in your tenancy. You pick the site you need and its dashboard is displayed. You can return to the site list at any time to pick a different site, and the Teams app dashboard switches to it.

Conor McGrath25:36

Another question: can I create a file in Teams and associate it with the workflow? Paul, maybe you can help.

Paul Stone25:47

Absolutely. The workflow we showed involved uploading a file from your laptop into the Teams files area, but you can create any workflow you like. You can collaborate in Teams, build up a lot of content there, and associate it with a workflow later, so you don't have to go workflow first: you can go content first and workflow later. The tool you use to pick a file from your PC can also pick a file from Teams, reaching into different teams to access files you've been working on together. It works in both directions.

Conor McGrath26:44

Thanks, Paul. Another question: can FlowForma generate files and place them in Teams? David?

David Shanley26:52

Yes. We didn't cover it in the webinar, but FlowForma has document generation, which creates documents based on Word templates. You merge data from FlowForma forms with the templates to produce an editable Word file or a PDF. In our tender example, we could have captured more details about the company issuing the tender and a summary of the proposal, and had FlowForma automatically build an executive summary document and place it in the Teams Files tab.

Conor McGrath27:39

Thanks, Dave. Here's one that's just come in: is it possible to get reports or dashboards to review the number of tasks completed and review cycles, and include a flow branch for invoicing? Paul?

Paul Stone27:59

Absolutely. The dashboard you saw, with the number of processes awaiting CCO approval, is fully configurable. You can show processes at any status, for example those awaiting approval that are assigned specifically to me, and build out those tiles easily and add them to the Teams app. You can also build reports based on all the data you capture in your workflows and surface them through a variety of tools. So there's a very comprehensive ability to capture data, and that data feeds the reports and the dashboard.

Conor McGrath29:07

Thanks, Paul. Another question: is there a test version of the Teams app available? I presume that means a trial.

Paul Stone29:14

Good point, because the Teams app itself is a viewer onto a FlowForma application sitting inside SharePoint. So you can definitely have a trial: get a trial of the FlowForma application, which you install in SharePoint from Microsoft AppSource, then install the Teams app from the Teams app store, and the two link together. If you'd like help, contact FlowForma through our website and the team will talk you through the installation, which is very straightforward.

Conor McGrath30:16

Great, thanks Paul. I think we'll leave it there for today and let everyone get back to their busy schedules. Thank you for joining us, and thanks to Paul and David for their time.

Conor McGrath30:54

Before we wrap up, we've launched our FlowForma for Microsoft Teams page on our website, where you'll find more on how you can get full visibility of tasks, decision making and collaboration. You can also visit our website to learn more and book a one-to-one demo. When the webinar ends you'll be invited to fill in a quick survey; it really helps us understand what you'd like to see in future webinars. Have a great day, everyone.