Setting up rigid processes and tools makes adapting to the changing needs of your business tedious. With custom objects in workflows, you can seamlessly setup highly durable automations with minimal maintenance checks required to keep up with your changing environment.
To help you understand how custom objects to automate your business needs, we have put together two detailed use cases to use custom objects.
Automating Request Management Processes
When your organization has a large workforce, managing approvals for your service items becomes tedious and time-consuming when you have to create workflows to support the same. Long and complex workflows are created with hard-coded approvers and the maintenance of these workflows becomes a long winding, erroneous process.
With Custom Objects, create crisp workflows by referencing a single source of truth to manage all your approvers. With no hardcoded approvers within workflows, skip long, cumbersome processes to update your approvers.
Usecase
An organization requires an application manager to approve access for software requests. There are multiple software applications managed, and the IT Manager has to configure multiple workflows to route the software requests to the right groups and to manage the approvals.
Creating the Custom Object
Create a Custom Object to manage your service item approvals.
Create the object fields to capture the information about your service items.
3. Create the Category field as a drop-down field with tickets as the source. Choose category as the dropdown values to be populated.
4. Create Approvers as lookup fields with All Users as the source.
4. Once the object fields are created, populate the required object records to capture information about all the service items in your organization.
5. This custom object can now be referenced within workflows to route requests and approvals.
Reader Nodes
Before Using Reader Node Click on the image to zoom in | After Using Reader Nodes Click on the image to zoom in |
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What are Reader Nodes?
Let’s say you want to route your service request based on the service item requested.
The reader nodes are used to read and reference information from the custom objects into the workflows. You can create conditions based on which a record is read into workflows from the custom objects.
For example, if a service request was raised requesting for a Macbook, the reader node can read the record from the business object by matching the service item information, and returns the right agent groups and approvers to route the request to.
Note:
- The reader node returns only one record. If multiple records match your conditions the reader node returns only the first record. You can choose a sorting order to ensure that the first record is picked right in such conditions.
- You can set up only up to 10 filter by conditions in the reader node. Please note that, if you are using dependent fields like category, every dependent field is considered as a unique condition.
Setting up the Workflow
1. Create the event to be Service Request is Raised.
2. Now insert the reader node to read information from the Custom Object. Every reader node is given a unique identifier. Example: R1
3. Select the Custom Object you want to read a record from.
4. Create the conditions based on which a record should be selected. For our use case here, create a condition to pull a record that matches the service item from the custom object with the requested service item.
Note: The first field selected is the Object Field. This will be matched with the fields/values of your choice.
5. If multiple records match your conditions the reader node returns only the first record. You can choose a sorting order to ensure that the first record is picked right in such conditions.
6. Click on Done to create the reader node. Now the output of the reader node will be a single record from which values will be referenced as <Reader ID>.<Object Field>. Example: R1.Category
7. To ensure that the workflows are not broken by empty results returned, you can place a condition to check if the reader returns records.
8. Create an Action Node to automatically set the category for the incoming service request by referencing the category returned by the reader node.
Action Node - Set Category As - R1.Category
9. Create an Action Node to route the service request to the approver returned by the reader node. Action Node - Send Approval Mail to R1.Approver.
10. Finally, create an Action Node to route the service request to the agent group returned by the reader node. Action Node - Assign to Group - R1.Agent Group
Note: The actions allow you to reference reader outputs only if the object field type matches with the action. For example, the action assign to group would require a lookup to agent group in the custom object reader.
Automating Change Management Processes
Change management processes in organizations are extremely fluid. Automating the change categorization results in complex, long winding workflows involving erroneous updation processes.
With custom objects, you can create a single source of truth to reference all the categorization and approval information about changes. Skip the complex workflows by referencing custom objects within change workflows to create crisp and simple automation.
Usecase
Automate assignment of change type based on its risk and priority. You also want to route the changes to the right change managers and approvers based on the change type.
Creating the Custom Object
1. Create a Custom Object to manage your change categorization and approvals.
2. Create the required object fields as dropdowns and choose the source as the corresponding fields from changes.
3. Create lookup fields sourcing from agents/requesters for Change managers and approvers.
4. This custom object can now be referenced within workflows to categorise and route changes.
Creating the Workflow
| Before Using Reader Nodes Click on the image to zoom in | After Using Reader Nodes Click on the image to zoom in |
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1. Create the Event to be Change is created.
2. Create a reader node to reference the right object record from your custom object based on the priority and risk of the change created.
3. Create a condition to check if the reader records returned are not empty to avoid breakage of workflows.
4. Create an Action Node to set the change type of the created change as the change type from the record returned by the reader node.
Action Node: Set Change Type as - R1.Change Type
5. Send an Approval email to the corresponding change approvers and change managers from the record returned by the reader node.
Action Node: Send Approval Mail to - R1.Change Approve
Send Email to Agent - R1.Change manager
Note: The actions allow you to reference reader outputs only if the object field type matches with the action. For example: If you want to set a value for priority field in changes then only the dropdown Object fields that have been mapped to Change.Priority will be available.
6. Once you activate the workflow, every change created will be assigned a type, approver, and a manager based on its priority and risk.
Note:
You can use certain actions in your workflows only if your reader references a custom object with the appropriate fields required to implement the action. You can use the following table to understand the requirements.
