Does the below scenario sound familiar? You’re trying to get a new project approved for your team, so you've sent your proposal to individuals across multiple departments. All you need are thoughts on implementation, suggested edits to the plan, and final sign-off. After some time passes, you start to compile all the feedback together, excited to launch your new project—until you realize you’re missing the approval of your finance manager! You send the proposal to the finance team, but now you’re worried that the project is going to be behind schedule.
To help you avoid these common organizational bottlenecks, the Formstack team has created a new add-on called Workflows. With this tool, you can let multiple people review, edit, and complete a single online form. So instead of building multiple forms to accomplish a task, you can now create a centralized, automated workflow that flows across departments. There’s no need to combine data from multiple forms or piles of paperwork. Each person can fill out their part of the form, and all the data is combined into a single form submission.Sounds like a dream come true, right? Here’s a breakdown of everything you need to know about the Workflows add-on:
Seamlessly Edit Workflows
Creating workflows can get extremely complicated very fast. With the Workflows editor’s intuitive interface, you can seamlessly build out the different steps of your workflow in a simple, clean format. To build a workflow, you need to create a special workflow form by choosing the Workflow Form option under Create a Form. After building out your form, you can choose which form sections should be included in each step, set up authentication requirements, and add participants to each section.For example, if you’re creating a workflow for project proposals, the entry step would contain all sections of the form that pertain to the initial proposal request. Other sections of the form that need to be filled out by managers and other stakeholders would be assigned to other steps in the workflow. So once a person completes the initial step, the form will be routed to all users that are assigned to the next step, and so on.
Set Up Participant Rights
If you’re worried about access controls, Workflows enables you to protect your processes through Participant Rights. Anyone can complete the initial step of a workflow form, but you can assign specific users to the sections that follow so they can only view and edit those particular areas of the form. This works great for those instances where you need to collect and discuss sensitive data.
Easily Track Submissions
Once you’ve finished building your workflow, you can monitor the progress of a submission and see where it is in your process. You can even track the time it takes to complete each step. This makes it super easy to identify bottlenecks in your process, so you can create streamlined, automated workflows that help you accomplish tasks faster.
Create Versatile Workflows
The Workflows add-on is a versatile tool that can be used for any process in your organization that is slow or burdensome. Whether you need to streamline the way your HR team handles performance reviews or improve the way patient needs are communicated between care providers, creating automated workflows with Formstack is fast, easy, and painless.
Workflows is currently available as a separate add-on to your Formstack account. If you’d like to learn more, please click here. Happy form building!
