What can Perspective’s Workflow module be used for? That is a very common question with a potentially very complex answer. But, to keep it simple, I’m going to break my response into two areas. The first being what Workflow is used for by 90% of our clients, and the second being some of the ‘out-of-the-box’ initiatives Workflow has been set up to accomplish.
First, you need to understand what Workflow actually does. Workflow has two simple tasks to complete:
- Find me when data exists, or when a situation within my data exists, without having to go into Perspective and look for it myself; and
- When that data or situation is found, do something with it.
So, what do I mean by ‘when data exists’ or ‘when a situation within my data exists’? Let me explain. When I’m consulting with my Workflow clients, I get them to start thinking about three things they’d like to see Workflow do for them. Those three things are:
- Tell me when a specific piece of data exists.
This is pretty wide open, but take a look at some fairly common examples used by clients: - Search to see if I have any open incidents that are older than 90 days.
- Search to see if I have any incidents of a specific category or at a specific location.
- Search to see if any of my assignments are due today.
- Search to see if I have a new eReport sitting in the Gateway.
- Tell me when a specific piece of data does NOT exist.
While Perspective can identify required fields, sometimes you or your data entry people don’t have those details when the record is created. Again, take a look at some examples used by clients: - An incident is closed, but there is no primary or secondary outcome identified.
- An incident is closed, but there are still open assignments associated with that incident.
- An incident is closed, but the investigation is still open (e.g., data in the Investigation Open Date, but no data in the Investigation Closed Date).
- On a regular basis (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or annually), provide me a basic report on some metric(s) that I require.
For example: - Monthly report that shows the number of incidents, broken down to the sub-category level.
- Quarterly report that shows the number of incidents, broken down by the third level of the site list.
- Monthly report that shows the number of incidents by sub-category, but only for my one site (and they have five sites within the system).
- Daily report that lists my active trespassers (trespass expiry date is today or future).
Once you’ve identified the data or situation you want to find, Workflow has to identify what you want it to do with that data. To cover the 90% of our clients and how they’re using Workflow, the simple answer is… automated email notifications. When that data or situation exists, email someone so that they know the data or the situation exists. The ‘reports’ mentioned above are formatted into a table-type look and emailed out to those that need to see them.
Generally, that’s the standard way that the vast majority of Perspective users have implemented Workflow. But, not all of our clients are ‘standard’. Some have very specific needs and wants. Below are a few examples of how PPM clients have taken data that resides within Perspective and done something with Workflow that goes beyond the norm.
Auditing Administrator Accounts
Because users that are identified in Perspective as ‘administrators’ have no data security within Perspective, we recommend to our clients that ‘administrators’ do not use their admin accounts for data entry. One client took this so seriously that we built them a monitoring of their admin account holders. With their Workflow set-up, the moment an administrator logs in and accesses a record, that information is immediately emailed to a team of three people who make up their ‘Perspective Compliance’ team. That administrator then has to explain each record he viewed and why he did so using his administrator account.
Specific Site List Requirements
A global client had very specific site list requirements. Their top level site was the global region (North America, EMEA, etc.), and the second level was the country within that region. They not only wanted to have users fill in, at a minimum, data to the country level, they also wanted to force the users down to the third level of the site (State/Province) but ONLY if the country was ‘United States’ or ‘Canada’. So, if that third level is missing data, but the second level meets the criteria above, their Workflow is set up to email the person who created the incident on a daily basis until someone goes and enters the appropriate data.
Standardized Checklists
For another client, when an incident is entered into Perspective that involves a lost/missing/stolen computer or smartphone, their Workflow system automatically emails a standardized checklist to the creator of the incident so that the user can fill in specific information and then attach the checklist to the incident.
Password Changes
Another Perspective client asked us to configure their Workflow system to notify users when an administrator changes their password (although it doesn’t identify what their new password is because that is encrypted within our database).
The final example I have of an atypical Workflow request is also the happiest I’ve ever heard a client and a great example of ROI…
Identifying Record Issues… and Correcting Them
This client ran into a fairly common issue of their users failing to assign the appropriate security to their person, item, organization and vehicle records. Because Perspective defaults all record security to that of the user who is creating it (to ensure your data is defaulted to a protected state), users with a high security level sometimes fail to assign a lower security to their records and, as a result, the visibility of those records is unintentionally restricted. As an example, a person record is created, but if the workgroup share isn’t set to read or update, the organizational rollup isn’t cleared out and the access level isn’t set to ‘1’, there’s no guarantee that all users will be able to see that person record. With this client, they had an administrator who was tasked, once a month with identifying the records that hadn’t been shared properly and then going and changing the security on those records to ensure that everyone can see them. This company requested that I not only identify the records for them, but actually write the data (including the audit trail) back to Perspective for them. When I ran this on their system the first time, the administrator who was tasked with manually changing the data in their system was EXTREMELY happy when he saw that I changed approximately 100 records for him in under 3 minutes. He estimated that this automated process would now save him approximately 60-90 minutes of ‘clean up’ work per month for this one task, not to mention the other automation notifications I had done for them.
In Summary…
When you need to know if an assault occurs, Workflow can monitor your database and as soon as it finds a new incident of assault, it grabs the data you want from that incident and emails it to you. When you want that statistical data each month, let Workflow break it down for you and have it sitting in your inbox (and your boss’s inbox) before you even get into work on the 1st of the month. No more having to look into the Perspective Gateway 40 times a day to see if a new eReport has been submitted. Let Workflow email you when one gets submitted.
These are just a few examples of what Perspective’s Workflow module can do, but don’t hesitate to think outside the box… if the data exists in Perspective, we can set Workflow up to find it.
If you already have Perspective Workflow and have some questions around your set-up, just let us know…
If you would like to learn more about Perspective Workflow and your options for custom alerts and business process automation, please request our Workflow datasheet…
—Dale Yushchyshyn, CPP, Director, Implementation Services
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