Digitize an incident management process in under 1 hour

Mallorie (FlowForma)00:00

Hi everybody, and thank you for joining us from all over the globe. My name is Mallorie, I'm a digital marketing executive here at FlowForma, and I'm so happy you joined us for our first Learn Lab, a new venture from FlowForma. Today we're going to see a business process digitized in under an hour.

Mallorie (FlowForma)00:51

A little housekeeping: this Learn Lab is being recorded, and we'll email you the recording so you can share it with others in your organization. If you have any technical issues, email info@flowforma.com. Everyone's lines are muted, so please use the chat for questions and comments as we go, and there's a short feedback survey at the end.

Mallorie (FlowForma)02:11

I'm excited to introduce my colleagues: Mirza Mehdi, our Product Manager, and Darragh Allen, our Technical Consultant. They'll show you how easy FlowForma process automation is to use: digitize processes quickly, gain rapid adoption and, most importantly for a lot of us, see an early return on your investment. This isn't a stiff webinar that saves questions for the end, so please take part in our poll and the chat while Darragh and Mirza build.

Mallorie (FlowForma)03:07

We asked everyone which process they were hoping to see today, and with 54.4% of the vote, an incident management process took the lead. So let's hand over to Mirza and Darragh.

Mirza Mehdi03:47

Thank you, Mallorie. I'm the Product Manager at FlowForma, and it's amazing to see people from throughout the world who want to digitally transform their processes. I'll cover our mission, our core objectives and the breadth of processes you can apply in your company.

Mirza Mehdi04:27

You're from different domains and industries, and everybody has one key pain point: automation. Our mission is to empower you to automate processes in-house, without technical expertise or a lot of training. You do best what you do, and leave digitization, automation and digital transformation to us.

Mirza Mehdi05:47

When we started building the product, we asked ourselves why we were creating it and how we wanted to deliver it. First, it's for our customers, who want to automate processes every day but don't have time to learn a new technical skill. So we kept it business-user focused, for people who don't need extensive IT knowledge.

Mirza Mehdi07:06

Second, all-in-one. With other tools, people hop between products to build a workflow, then a form, then generate a document. With FlowForma you build your workflows, create your forms and generate your documents all in one place.

Mirza Mehdi07:51

Third, time to value. You should be able to digitize a process within about six to eight weeks of signing up, so you see the benefits and the return on investment. A dedicated team runs our SureStart program to get you up and running with at least one process in that time.

Mirza Mehdi08:35

And adoption. Someone from finance joins, builds flows for finance, then sees the value in connecting to other areas, so they move from finance to HR and from HR to supply chain. That's how customers grow the number of workflows across the whole organization.

Mirza Mehdi09:37

Many customers start in HR: performance reviews at the end of the year, people leaving, and recruitment. In finance, it's travel and expense management. In health and safety, many customers, especially in construction, use it for site inspections and risk assessments, and today we're doing incident management.

Mirza Mehdi11:01

In IT, an entire support system can be built on FlowForma, especially change management. In customer service, it's renewals, engagement and onboarding. And in compliance, from GDPR to carbon emissions and general regulatory compliance. We also see project management, quality management, document approval, travel requests and supply chain. Digitization is no longer an option; it's imperative.

Darragh Allen12:37

Thank you, Mirza. I'm a technical consultant at FlowForma, and today I'll build a significant incident management process in its entirety. The key goals are to find out where the incident happened, who it happened to, what happened and when.

Darragh Allen13:37

This is the FlowForma admin page. I've mocked up the process previously, so here's a taster: the incident report details with guidance on how to complete the form, then the incident details. On submit, it goes to HR for approval, and once they approve, we automatically generate documents and store the information in other systems.

Darragh Allen14:24

I create a new process flow called Significant Incident, with a prefix. Anyone who has built in FlowForma will recognize this three-in-one building tool, where we map out the process steps and questions, and automatically generate documents and forms.

Darragh Allen15:01

The first step is the reporting details, which I assign to myself. I turn off the attachments, comments and CC list in the footer, since I'll add attachments as a question, and I allow pass-back, so if the wrong information is captured, the approver can send it back to whoever created the form.

Darragh Allen16:00

Under the reporting details I add a separator, a border that makes the form look more professional, in FlowForma's blue with white text. Then the incident reporter name, a person or group question set to the current user, so it picks me up from Active Directory in Microsoft 365. If Mirza opened the form, it would be his name. That's purely for the audit.

Darragh Allen17:41

Next, the report date and time, defaulting to today at 60-minute intervals. You can test the form at any time with Start a test form, or check the look and feel with the form preview.

Mirza Mehdi18:20

What's amazing to see is how quickly you can check what you've built.

Darragh Allen19:05

The person who initiates the form isn't necessarily the person who was injured, so I add the injured party name as a single line of text. Then the department, a choice question: finance, IT, sales, HR or project management. Choice questions can be a drop-down, radio buttons, or checkboxes when you want people to select more than one option.

Darragh Allen20:40

Finally, the project. Many people who get injured are on site, working on an external project. With a lookup, FlowForma can pull information directly from a project management or construction system. Today I'm using a SharePoint list of projects and taking the project name from it.

Darragh Allen22:10

Next, the incident details. I add another separator, then the date of the incident, with no default, because the report might be for an accident two or three days ago, or a month ago. Then a separate question for the time of the incident, so everything is captured for the audit.

Darragh Allen23:34

Then the incident location, a choice of location A, B or C, and the area, a lookup into a SharePoint list of locations and areas. I add a filter so the areas shown match the location chosen: pick location A and you only see areas A1 and A2. That's how you drill down to exactly where an incident happened.

Darragh Allen26:16

One of the main questions in any incident is whether the immediate cause is known. That's a yes/no question, and if it's yes, people need to describe it, so I add a multi-line text question and hide it. Then a hide/show question rule, written in plain English: if the immediate cause is known equals yes, show the immediate cause. You can use business rules like this to create very intelligent, bespoke forms.

Mirza Mehdi28:03

What I see there is how simple it is. Adding rules is usually so difficult, but here it took very little time.

Darragh Allen28:28

With a tool like FlowForma, the process owners on the ground are the experts in the tasks they do every day, so we enable them to map out their own processes. When the process is mapped out by the people who run it, employee adoption improves.

Darragh Allen29:05

Next, the immediate remedial actions taken on site: evacuate all persons, area closed off, first aid provided and ambulance called. These can be configured for whatever your department, sector or industry needs, and as a checkbox you can select more than one.

Darragh Allen30:22

Some forms need a PDF of guidance on the best way to fill them out. I add a file upload question called guidance for usage, hide the button, move it to the top, and use a set question value rule to pull the guidance document from a document library into the form. I set the rule to fire when the form loads, because that's the first thing people should see.

Mirza Mehdi33:02

You've seen a great idea there: drafting all the questions first. It all starts with a plan of what a process contains at a high level, and from that you design the forms and the questions.

Darragh Allen33:56

Next, an approval step, which I assign to myself, since I'm playing multiple roles today. It captures the approver name for the audit, set to the current user, ideally someone from HR. Then an approve yes/no question, and comments if it isn't approved, shown by a hide/show rule only when the answer is no.

Darragh Allen35:43

The buttons on each question let you edit it, hide or show it, enable or disable it so people can't change the information, and make it required, so information must be entered before the process moves on.

Darragh Allen36:29

When HR adds comments, how does the person who reported the incident see them? Three business rules fire at the approval step. First, a pass-back: if the approval equals no, pass it back to the reporting details step.

Darragh Allen37:12

From a roles and permissions perspective, the reporter only sees their own step, so I add a hidden comments question to the first step, a set question value rule that copies the approver's comments into it, and a hide/show rule that shows it when the approval equals no.

Darragh Allen38:30

I disable the reporter name, report date and approver name so nobody can change them, and run a test form. The guidance document is at the top, then the reporter name, injured party, department, project, date and time, location and filtered area, the immediate cause and the remedial actions. On submit, it's routed straight to the second step, where HR can approve, or click no and add a comment.

Darragh Allen39:58

We often see a pass-back used for documents. FlowForma lets external users gain temporary access, so you can pass back to an external user to upload a certificate, design plans or health and safety documents. Here, the HR comments now appear at the bottom of the first step, and I disable them so they can't be changed.

Darragh Allen41:01

When the form is approved, we need to generate a document and email the line manager of the person who had the accident. I add a generate document rule, store the document in the significant incident reporting library, convert it to PDF and open it in a new tab.

Darragh Allen42:25

FlowForma sits within the Microsoft ecosystem, and there's an add-in for Microsoft Word that identifies every variable captured in the process. I add the FlowForma logo, then the reporter name, injured party name and remedial actions taken from each step. If you already have these documents as a manual process, you just copy them into the template and use the variables captured in the form.

Darragh Allen44:30

Next, a send email rule with a new template, again using the variables captured in the form, such as the injured party's name, and attaching the generated document. The recipient can be a variable, a role, a department or an individual user; today I'm sending it to myself.

Darragh Allen46:48

Running a final test: the guidance document opens, my name and the date are at the top, I'm the injured party in IT on project A, the incident was today, the 28th, in location B, area B2. The immediate cause is a slip and fall, the area was closed off, first aid provided and an ambulance called. On submit, it goes to HR, who can send it back with comments, and once it's resubmitted and approved, it moves on.

Darragh Allen48:16

In my inbox, I received the email two minutes ago with the generated PDF, built from the Word template, and the document is stored in the library. So that's the incident management form, with business rules, document generation, an email and a pass-back between departments.

Mirza Mehdi49:22

That was amazing. From a user's perspective, you build your flows, create your forms, add questions, test the form, send an email and generate a document, all in one product. That's what I'm really proud of.

Mallorie (FlowForma)49:54

Well done on the quick build, Darragh. Our last poll: what process challenges is your organization currently facing? Visibility, communicating with suppliers and customers, skills, reporting, or email-based processes?

Mallorie (FlowForma)51:03

It looks like it was almost an even split across the board, so the attendees' process needs are pretty varied. Mirza, any feedback on those results?

Mirza Mehdi51:30

Process visibility is a significant pain point we come across with a lot of our customers. With FlowForma, everything is logged, checked and tested end to end, so every customer gets end-to-end visibility of their processes.

Mallorie (FlowForma)51:49

We'll make quick work of a couple of questions. Do you have a library of preapproved actions?

Darragh Allen52:09

Yes. From a document generation perspective, only approved processes go into that document library. We also have process performance in FlowForma, so you can drill into each process and step, see what's holding them up, and see the successful and unsuccessful cases.

Mallorie (FlowForma)52:50

Ethan, in health and safety, asks whether there's a work permit form option.

Mirza Mehdi53:13

We have options to integrate forms like that, and a lot of customers have built them. FlowForma caters to every industry, and construction is our strength, so that shouldn't be a problem at all.

Mallorie (FlowForma)53:46

You can book a one-to-one call with any of our process experts, sign up for a free personalized demo, or try a free trial, all at flowforma.com. If we didn't get to your question in the chat, we'll answer it directly, and there's a quick survey when the webinar ends. I hope you enjoyed FlowForma's first Learn Lab. Have a great rest of your day.