Forms and Workflows

Forms and Workflows

One of the most powerful features of Incident Tracker is the use of workflows with a custom incident report form. Together, and combined with statuses, assignments, and alerts, your reports can be tracked from start to finish.  Workflows are the backbone of the automated Incident Tracker processes. They are sets of rules, which can be combined, and executed when specific actions occur.  Actions are things like editing a report, changing the status, or simply sending an alert.

Let’s take a look at a very specific example that highlights how workflows can be structured in conjunction with a form your organization uses every day to help re-inforce a business practice.

Problem: As part of a business practice you must have multiple people complete this form.

Incident Report Form

incident report form

(Note that each form field can be set to be required or optional and can have a specific data type expected, such as date, number etc…)

Workflow Process

The incident report form has four parts.  Four different people must fill out their respective part.  After each person fills out a part they must notify the next person to take action and so on.

Incident Tracker elegantly handles this entire workflow, including the ability to set a status for each step.

For example, John begins the process and fills out part 1, with a workflow rule once John finishes his part. Incident Tracker will automatically notify the next person, let’s call this person Sally, that now must complete Part 2.  Sally will receive a custom automated message, perhaps stating “Hi Sally, can you please complete Part 2, thanks – John” and the status of the report can automatically be changed to “Stage 2”.

From here, Sally can complete her part and once she does, the system will automatically notify Frank that he must complete part 3. The report status then automatically changes to “Stage 3” and so on until the last part is completed. At that point, John, Sally and Frank’s supervisor receive an automated message saying the report is complete. The status is be changed to “closed – pending approval”.  The supervisor can then review the form and set the status to closed.

Everything is customizable, the status names, the workflow messages, the alerts, etc…

The Supervisor can run a report to view all reports at Stage 3 and also see how long the reports have been at that particular stage.

Using these combination of tools can change how you do business. Incident Tracker lets you completely customize forms, workflows, assignments, statuses and stale date criteria native to Incident Tracker.