Fulcrum workflows automate the process of taking the data you collect and pushing into new processes — without any additional effort from data collectors or their supervisors. We're excited about it because it's the first step to helping you:
We’ll spend a few blog posts showing how Fulcrum workflow automation delivers these benefits, and more, as you modernize your mobile workforce.
Safety and quality inspections can be difficult because they’re invasive: Someone has to step aside and let the inspector access their work. That puts a lot of pressure on the inspector to be quick — there’s no faster way to have people resent the time you spend “checking boxes” than to take a long time doing it.
(You want to prove that your efforts are about more than box-checking? That’s incredibly important, and we’ll spend more time on that when we talk about becoming more data-driven.)
Moreover, the inspection is just the beginning. Unsafe conditions and quality problems need to be detected, reported, and remediated as quickly as possible.
Fulcrum workflows can automatically send emails or SMS messages to users who need them, whether those users are supervisors, clients, or regulators.
Those messages can contain information from the inspection — specific data points, comments, a note about a failed item — as well as complete, fully formatted PDF reports that contain all of the data from the inspection or a relevant subset. It’s as easy as choosing the report you want to send: See the drop-down box highlighted in green in the image below.
You can see how that could improve communication in any of the above situations. And it starts the moment the record is collected.
Workflows can also drive data into other systems using webhooks.
Some readers just got nervous: That sounds daunting. I get it — but don’t worry.
A webhook is a kind of “push” of data from one system to another, in this case from Fulcrum into other applications. Any time we’re describing how machines communicate with each other, there’s room for jargon and confusion.
The good news is that Fulcrum strips out as much of the confusing stuff as we can. Even someone who’s not a programmer can follow a plug-and-chug process that sends data from a record to another application, making that application react to the new data in an instant.
And that means non-programmers can make other programs dance to Fulcrum’s tune. The ability to instantly get a reaction from some other application reduces the follow-on time needed for your inspection processes. That leads to greater productivity, fewer data errors, and happier stakeholders — whether clients, business leaders, or the administrators who no longer need to laboriously copy your records from a piece of paper into an application screen.
In our next post, we’ll talk about increasing speed and rigor without sacrificing flexibility. In the meantime, check out this extended demo video that will show you some of the great ways workflows can be used.
Stay tuned!
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