Nintex to the Rescue: Harnessing the Power of Nintex to Delight Your Customers
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Learn how to delight your customers with workflow and forms tools from Nintex, through the lens of a case study on an FDA Food Recall workflow.
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Nintex to the Rescue: Harnessing the Power of Nintex to Delight Your Customers
- 11. Small IT department using SPD + InfoPath • Code-light; modern web code, not server-side C# SharePoint not business-critical (yet) • No complex solution deployment; simple export of workflows, forms and list templates SharePoint 2010, moving to 2013 • If it works in 2010, it works in 2013 High-visibility project • Deliver immediate value; agile approach “Teach me how to fish” • Self-documenting workflow
- 12. This is the workflow diagram provided to us by the business stakeholders.
- 14. Audit trail • Verbose logging to workflow history list At-a-glance visualization • OOB workflow visualization with progress indicators; choose what to show Email updates every 10 min. • Parallel action + loop + “wait” control Task escalation • Escalation built into task shape 100+ parallel tasks with changing approvers • SharePoint list + collection variable + single task
- 15. Audit trail • Verbose logging to workflow history list Protip: use lots of variables!
- 16. Audit trail • Verbose logging to workflow history list
- 18. At-a-glance visualization • OOB workflow visualization with progress indicators; choose what to show
- 19. At-a-glance visualization • OOB workflow visualization with progress indicators; choose what to show
- 20. Email updates every 10 min. • Parallel action + loop + “wait” control
- 21. Task escalation • Escalation built into task shape OR • Auto-delegate and assign new task
- 22. 100+ parallel tasks with changing approvers • SharePoint list + collection variable + single task 2 31 cjohnson@psclistens.com gcostanza@contoso.com ebenes@contoso.com jseinfeld@contoso.com
- 23. Branded forms and email notifications • Design once + import, export; rich text HTML design in email shapes Smooth attachment management • Support for custom JavaScript DOM manipulation w/jQuery Validation • Straightforward validation rules with user-friendly error messages
- 26. {choice control} + {rules} {repeating data control} {jQuery} + {workflow initiation rules} {person control} + {user profile lookup function}
- 27. Import + Export are your friend! FORM DESIGN List item Task 1 Task 2 Task 3
- 30. ~1:1 INDEPENDENT time: FACEtime w/client
Editor's Notes
- Very quickly, a little bit about me CLICK From the great city of Chicago, IL Huge Cubs Fan Wife and I are expecting our first baby in June! So if you know anyone who wants Cubs season tickets, let me know CLICK Working with Nintex for a couple years now Work for a great consulting firm out of Chicago called PSC group, and we’ve been partners with Nintex for a few years CLICK Earned my stripes building workflows and forms the hard way Before I go any further, I’d like to know a little bit about you….
- CLICK
- The agenda for today is very simple: I’m going to give you 4 building blocks for building a solution that delights your customers To do that, you need to: Understand what’s at stake Choose a technology that addresses your biggest challenges Make the user experience a priority Focus on solving the business problem over just building a technical solution As I walk through each of these building blocks, I’m going to present them through the lens of a solution that we built for one of our clients One we’re very proud of, and one that I know they would say delighted them Not about the solution– it’s about the process
- Let’s level-set– what makes a delightful customer experience? Agility Ability to roll with the punches and add new functionality as you learn more about the business process On the other side of that coin, hit our deadlines We want the customer to understand what we built and feel comfortable supporting it Want the customer to feel like this is a partnership, not a purchase Spend as much time listening as possible So how do you go about building a solution that delights your customers?
- Before I design a solution, I always ask myself: what’s at stake? CLICK Why is this important to the business? CLICK Let me tell you what the answer isn’t “because they want to disrupt disparate data process flows by synergizing workforce accelerators in the cloud.” #IOT #BIGDATA The answer to the question “What’s at stake?” should always be relative to the business, not to technology. If you can’t answer the question “What’s at stake” without talking about technology, you’re going to miss the forest through the trees.
- Here’s a 20,000-ft. view of the business problem we were asked to solve. Probably closer to a 100,000-ft. view CLICK Our client is a national logistics firm Warehouses all over the country that store perishable inventory Because of this, THEIR CUSTOMERS need to comply with the Food and Drug Administration guidelines for isolating tainted food CLICK We were brought in because our client’s customers needed our client to prove, 2 times/year, that they could execute one of these recalls Including isolating all tainted inventory at all 100+ locations In under 4 hours If our client couldn’t prove they could do this, they would lose some of their biggest customers We’re talking some of the largest retail distribution companies in America Piece of cake, right? GOOD NEWS: Already had a manual process to handle this BAD NEWS: It just took 4 days, not 4 hours
- What was at stake? Answer was very simple Hint to you consultants, it’s really easy to tell a high-stakes project when your kickoff meeting is with 2 C-level executives In business-speak, revenue Our client was going to lose customers if they couldn’t prove FDA compliance You could argue that even more importantly, public health was at stake Recalled food poses a serous health risk to consumers
- Once everyone understands what’s at stake, you can get to work solving the problem As a consultant, I’ve found that there is more and more pressure to choose a technology earlier and earlier in the process of building a solution Often, we don’t have a ton of choice We’re bound to a platform like SharePoint or Salesforce before we even walk in the door As an architect, I want to use a tool that is going to help me delight my clients
- We faced a few challenges on this project, and I’ve divided them into 3 categories Client Workflow User Experience I know what you’re thinking– did he really just call the client a challenge? OF COURSE I DID– have you ever had an easy client? Of course not But would you be in the technical services business if all the clients were easy? Of course not.
- At PSC, when we start a project, we fill out what we call a risk profile It identifies challenges that we anticipate facing during the engagement I’m going to walk through some of the risks we identified with this client AND ways that we knew we could rely on the Nintex platform to mitigate these risks The first CHALLENGE posed by the client was…
- Why am I showing you this? I want you to understand that this is a complex process This might not look THAT complex I want to drive home the point that even with a well-defined process like this to start with, every solution starts with question marks CLICK This blue square could actually be 10 steps in a workflow, but to the business, it’s one step CLICK This orange square could be an external process that’s managed by 3 different technologies– we just don’t know until we ask the right questions
- In talking to the business stakeholders throughout several requirements gathering sessions, we learned that this is what the process really looks like Let’s all cock our heads to the side together so nobody feels silly Starts when a vendor initiates the food recall process Merchandising is notified 4-hour window begins Then merchandising kicks off the recall and 3 processes start, all in parallel The legal department has some decisions to make, including whether or not customers need to be notified Customer care needs to notify affected customers Most importantly, inventory management begins the process of isolating the affected inventory After the inventory has been isolated, the bulk of the work is done 4-hour window is closed There are a few wrap-up actions that have to take place Finally, the FDA comes in and audits the process
- When it came to building the actual workflow, the urgency of the situation presented some unique challenges CLICK Nintex platform helped us mitigate these as well Don’t rush through reading these, I’m going to touch on them one at a time
- Probably the single biggest requirement for this solution was the audit trail, and Nintex made it easy CLICK We made frequent use of the Log in History list actions, combined with about 40+ local variables that we could log at any time during the workflow execution Protip: use variables! CLICK Figured out that the full workflow log URL is available as a variable in the workflow Set a Hyperlink column on the list item that takes you directly to the full log or the graphical summary
- Here’s a sample of the audit trail created by the workflow CLICK Just a tiny piece of it, but you can see how detailed it is And you can see every action, every outstanding task Who completed what, when
- Story We had one stakeholder, going to call him Ken Ken was one of those clients– the ones who know just enough to be dangerous Push the boundaries of scope as much as possible He liked to come to my desk after we’d have our status meetings How many of you know a Ken? I’ve got news for the rest of you who didn’t raise your hands As a consultant, I’m pretty good at managing scope (code for “good at saying no”), but one time he asked me, is there any way you can build some sort of visualization for us to see where the bottlenecks are? And I got to say, as a matter of fact, yes!
- There isn’t a 4k monitor in the world that could fit this entire workflow on it CLICK So here’s one part of the workflow in the designer– now just picture it expanding another 20 or so feet down CLICK Most Nintex workflow actions support a little checkbox in the Common tab that allows the shape to be hidden from the workflow status So when the business users looked at a running workflow, what they saw was this
- And they could expand each of these sections if they wanted, to see who wasn’t doing their part One of the joys of working with Nintex is being able to say YES to the Kens of the world Making the Kens happy is a huge step toward delighting your client
- Another challenge dictated by the urgency of the process was the need for key stakeholders to receive updates every 10 minutes via email Once again at the 4 hour mark This was so simple to do with Nintex that it’s not even funny CLICK All we did was break off a couple of parallel action branches Stick an email action and a timer in a while loop CLICK Instead of spending time coding something like this, we built a beautiful rich HTML email that gave a real-time status of each branch of the workflow
- I already mentioned how critical visualization of bottlenecks was to this time-sensitive workflow, and here was another critical piece: escalation CLLICK We assigned tasks based on roles that were configurable by a core group of users SharePoint list Because if somebody doesn’t complete a task in time, you need that to go up the ladder Nintex has built-in task escalation CLICK But if you want more control, you can auto-complete tasks and indicate that they were delegated, which allows you to log additional messages to the workflow history and even alter the delegated task if it needs to be a little bit different
- Probably the biggest challenge we faced building this workflow was executing the most important step– isolating inventory at each of 100+ facilities Furthermore, we had to use an existing SharePoint list to drive this process If you don’t know, Nintex on-premise and Nintex in the cloud a little bit different One of the nice perks in O365 Nintex is that you can tell a task NOT to pause the workflow while it’s waiting to be completed You can’t do that on-premise, and we learned quickly that putting a Task inside a while loop waited until that task was completed before it looped So we had to find a way to assign 100 tasks at once, and this is how we did it CLICK
- The third challenge we faced was related to the user experience
- This is a wonderful segue to the third building block of a solution that delights your clients That is: prioritizing the user experience
- Intuitive design Forms should strike a balance between simple and powerful A lot of times that just means removing clutter Make the user do as little work as possible The same way that you automate as much of a business process as you can, do the same with your forms Consistent look and feel Using every form in your solution should be like riding a bike– you feel like you’ve done it before Customize your task forms! If you do your job right
- I always say that it all starts with a great form Why? Because that’s what the users see first Just a few things we were able to build QUICKLY– and I mean in just a couple of days CLICK Tabbed screens to get more use out of small real estate Choice control and rules CLICK User lookup to auto-fill things like a user’s Role and Email Address User Profile Lookup function I was talking about CLICK Repeating section Repeating data control CLICK Ability to save as a draft or to kick off the workflow immediately jQuery and initiation rules set on the workflow
- Just a quick protip: Use forms Import and Export to your advantage What I like to do is design a list item form and get everything right The spacing The branding Logo Tab controls JavaScript references, etc. Then when I build task forms, don’t start from scratch! Import your list item form Delete the controls that are bound to the list item Left with a branded, clean canvas with the layout just how you want it
- The last building block of a solution that delights your clients probably seems the most obvious Focus on solving the business problem OVER just building a technical solution If you take away one thing from today’s presentation, I want it to be this and what I have on the next 2 slides Because this, IMO, is where the Nintex platform really shines
- After we delivered the solution, I asked the PM on this project to send me a breakdown of the hours our development team spent on each task CLICK What I found is amazing. Now look what happens when we remove the PM and Testing tasks.
- We had close to a 50/50 split between time spent developing and time spent learning the business process and training the users Here’s another way to look at that: CLICK We spent nearly the same amount of independent time building this solution as we did facetime with the client. Talk about delivering an experience that delights your client– more facetime means focusing on solving the business problem over JUST building a technical solution.
- The recipe for building a solution that delights your client CLICK Starts with understanding what’s at stake In business terms, not in technobabble CLICK When you know what’s at stake, and when you’re ready to choose a technology, choose one that best addresses your biggest challenges There’s a pretty good chance that Nintex fits this bill wonderfully for whatever you’re building CLICK Make sure that you prioritize the user experience I’m talking about building beautiful forms That’s what the users see FIRST CLICK Finally and most importantly Focus on solving the business problem over JUST building a technical solution