Level up with Fulcrum: automating workflows, part I

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:

• Increase productivity in safety, quality, and other inspections 
• Increase rigor and speed without sacrificing flexibility
• Speed up your organization's reaction time to events that happen in the field
• Help your organization become more data-driven

We’ll spend a few blog posts showing how Fulcrum workflow automation delivers these benefits, and more, as you modernize your mobile workforce.

Increasing productivity in inspections

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.

• A problem with water quality should be reported to the people who use the water, as well as those who maintain the water system, as soon as possible. Even a short time with bad water can cause serious health problems. 
• A significant in-process quality control (IPQC) check on a manufacturing line might automatically update line managers, those in charge of materials management, and possibly even customer service. The longer it takes to communicate with everyone who needs to know, the worse your long-term issues are, such as storing too much raw material or finished inventory. 
• Feasibility studies happen at a time during a construction or engineering project where small amounts of time can make a big difference. Cutting the time it takes to produce and deliver reports can have a dramatic impact on the cost of the project. 

Improving communication

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.