New Fulcrum Workflow Capability
The Fulcrum team was super excited to introduce the Workflows capability this week, and we can’t wait to hear about the different ways our customers use it!
With this new capability, you can create dynamic workflows within your apps that trigger automated actions based on the data that is collected in the field — without coding.
Setting up a workflow is a three-step process that takes place within the Workflows tab in the App Dashboard:
- Define the trigger
- Configure the filters
- Set up the action
Workflows initiate an activity on your behalf, such as automatically sending an email, SMS, or webhook when certain conditions are met — saving you from unnecessary steps in your business processes that waste time, energy, and resources.
Some examples:
- When a building fails an inspection, Fulcrum can push an email to the contractor so they don’t have to wait for you to send the inspection report to schedule a revisit.
- When a workplace injury occurs, Fulcrum can instantly notify HR so they can begin follow-up actions right away.
- When tech finishes installing a machine that requires the clients to be trained, Fulcrum can send a webhook alerting the scheduling system to initiate the scheduling process.
Here’s a walk-through that explains Workflows in deeper detail:
Workflows are available on every Fulcrum plan, but since they can send data outside of the platform, they are only accessible to system-level Owners.
Want to know more? Read the documentation here or request a one-on-one demonstration.
And be sure to tweet us @fulcrumapp to let us know how you use it!
Update:
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
Check out the blog posts below to learn how Fulcrum workflow automation delivers these benefits, and more, as you modernize your mobile workforce. And as a preview of Part IV of the series, here’s a snippet about how automating workflows improves your processes and your data for better overall results.
Automating impact
Consider five things when trying to become more data-driven.
- Capturing better data at the beginning of a workflow. The data capture process is as important as everything that follows, because it’s the way you get high-quality, high-value data to begin with.
- Capturing location information every step along the way. If there’s one thing we’ve found over the years, it’s that location data can greatly enrich analysis and decision making — but if you don’t automatically capture it, it’s unlikely to be there when you need it. Adding it in after the fact makes for a lot of lost time.
- Sharing information with people. People need information in a variety of forms. Some of the best are PDF reports, dynamic maps, and spreadsheets.
- Sharing information with tools. When people need to do more complex analysis, they use tools like Tableau or Microsoft PowerBI. You’ll want to provide extracts to those tools or, even better, enable the tools to get a shared view of the data whenever they want it. These tools will typically use comma-separated values (CSV), JSON, and the like, although geographic tools will use a variety of “geospatial” formats.
- Sharing information with systems. When information needs to be integrated with other processes or to be used for deeper analysis, it needs to be pushed into other systems. This might be a data warehouse, a CRM application, or a business process management platform. These systems will use web service-based APIs, webhooks, and data feeds to integrate your data with their processes.