Create your business flow, defining how to pass successfully from one status to the next, and add actions to fully automate how you run your business processes.
Before moving to Progressions, it’s important to have an understanding of our Statuses. Using the business process configuration screen you can review the progressions for each of your Module types, and add new progressions and Actions to it.
Progressions and Actions
If you're familiar with the concept of a flow chart, each status is like a "box" in a flow-chart, and the progressions are the lines that join the boxes together. By nominating a starting and ending status, you're able to provide your users with a clear business process to follow, improving consistency and coordination across your team.
On each progression, you can configure what we call actions - things that happen, like asking the user to enter some information into a field, or upload a file, create a task or send an email to another user. By combining Progressions and Actions, Accelo becomes your central system for managing all business processes.
Your Progression options are specific to the Module Types in your list. Records that use statuses can be moved to a new status using the Status Bar.
In your status bar you will see the Current Status (yellow) > Available progressions (blue). If you find your record is in a status with nowhere to progress to, you can configure your module to add a new progression options.
Create Progressions
When creating Progressions you must select a Type because these progressions are designed to be unique to a type of work.
However, if you find you need an Progression to be applied to more than one type, you can +Add Type from Configuration page and choose to Clone progressions from and choose which Module Type to replicate.
Note - you must be an admin user to access this feature.
To create a progression:
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Navigate to the Module Configuration page, by clicking the Modules Button > Configuration
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Choose your desired Module > Progressions & Fields > Module Types
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To create a Progression, Click on the New Progression button.
Define fields in your progression:
- Title: Name of the Progression. It defaults to the name of the To Status, but it can be named as something separately.
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From Status - Any: This means that ANY Status can progress to the defined To Status. For example, you might want to put a status of Paused in the To Status field for this option, because you want to be able to pause an object no matter what status it is in.
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From Status - On Create: This means that when the object is created, it can move to the defined To Status. For example, you may want to put a status of Open in the defined To Status field in this option, because you want to make sure items you just created can be opened.
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From Status - Specified: This means that only the defined Specified Status can progress to the defined To Status.
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To Status: The status you’re progressing to.
Progression Actions
Progression Actions are an important part of automating your business process. Actions are the things that happen, like asking the user to enter some information into a field, or upload a file, create a task or send an email to another user. For example, you can set it so that when you Close an Issue that you will automatically send out an email to notify the Client that the work is finished, and also go to the Approval screen to bill for the work tied to it.
How flexible you want your Progression Actions are up to you, as you have the option to make them required, or even hidden from view as your statuses change.
Note - any progression actions set up within status progressions will progress with in the following order by action type: Field (first) > File > Activity > Task > Special (last).
You’ll typically have five types of Actions to add to a Progression:
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Update Field: You can update default and Custom Profile fields.
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Upload File: You can prompt a file to be uploaded.
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Create Activity: You can prompt an activity to be sent, and also define a template.
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Create Task: You can define a templated Task, or just create a new one.
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Special Process: There’s a variety of special processes available, such as going to the approval screen, or marking all related Tasks as complete with Work Done.
Other fields
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Workflow required - job progressions allow you to select if a workflow is required on the job before this progression may be run. If you would like to know more about the job workflow, please see Milestones & Tasks.
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Progress - sales progressions allow you to set a progress level. This means when this progression is run for a sale, the sale progress value will be updated (this makes up part of the thermometer statistics).
Reorder Progressions
To re-order your status progressions, click and drag each progression box one-at-a-time on the left of the progression.
Delete Progressions
To remove a progression, you must first remove any Actions associated with it - they're listed under the Actions column whilst viewing your progressions.
Before removing the progression, you should consider whether this will cause problems with any records that are currently using that progression. E.g. if I have some issues in the "Submitted" status and I delete my Submitted > Open progression, then I may have no way to open my issues
To remove an Action, click the Action Expand button to show all related actions associated with the status progression. You can remove by clicking the recycle bin icon next to each action.
Once no actions are associated with the status progression, you will see the delete icon (recycle bin) on the right. Click this delete icon to remove the progression.