Full Master class Unlock the power of process hub!

Okay, welcome everyone. So thank you for joining us on one of our first webinars. This first webinar is basically going to be focused on one of our hubs in the application, which is the Process Hub. So in this webinar, what we're going to focus on is learning some key principles or tips on how the Process Hub works, what we can do and what we can't do. And what we want to try and do here is just educate people on the tool, both our customers and also anyone interested in becoming a customer or using Q-Hub to understand how the Process Hub can help. And also if they wanted to build a process, just some common things that we've seen over the years that people make mistakes about or things that we've realized work really well within Process Hub. So we just want to make sure that everyone knows about those things. This is the first of a few webinars that we're going to be doing in terms of masterclass type webinars on parts of the application.

So to start with we'll just give you a bit of an idea of more specifically what we're going to look at in these two sections of this webinar. So the first thing that we're going to be looking at is just general best practice advice for making a process, when to use them. A common question we get is, "How do I know whether to use a form or a process?" So we're going to cover a bit of an understanding of that. Examples of what not to do in a process. We've got some real processes that we've taken from different things we've seen over the years from our customers trying to do that doesn't work too well. And just make that very clear as to how and why you shouldn't do those things. We're also going to show you how to keep processes simple but still drive sort of efficiency and make it easy for your users to work with. And then we're going to talk about approvals because approvals comes up a lot within processes. It's a really good tool for managing approvals, but you don't want it to become overly complicated as well. And then the second part is we're going to look at a really good example of something that Process Hub can do, particularly this works well for things like supplier approval processes or feedback, but we'll go into that more specifically then.

Because you have joined the webinar or you've watched it a bit later, we are actually going to do a live demo of one of our new AI tools which we'll go into more detail at the end as I'm going along. Feel free to put any questions in the Q&A section and if there's any at the end I'll come back and try to answer them as much in as detail as I can with the time that we have left.

So to kick us off, the first thing that we are going to focus on is that best practice bit for making processes and forms and understanding where to make them and where not to make them. So I'm just going to talk through this slide a little bit first to give you some sort of general information and then we're actually going to go into the application and have a look at how that works.

So a common question we always get is, well, how do I know whether to use a form or a process? Because if you haven't used Q-Hub before, or if you have used Q-Hub, you'll know that there's lots of different ways that things can be done and there are benefits to doing things a certain way, but that might not always be apparent from the get-go. Something we're actually working on with the help center and training courses, but we want to make this clear in webinars like this as well.

So forms are really good for when information needs to be captured sort of in a one-off. So let's say you have inspections that need to be done out on the shop floor. It might be a check of something. It could be a machine checklist. It could be an inspection of a part or a component. If you think traditionally, you've got a piece of paper, one person holds that piece of paper, writes in the answers, and then that might go into a spreadsheet or a database in the background. So those types of things or a checklist. You're walking around the shop floor or you're walking around one of your customer sites or a project that you're working on and you want to just check off things that you're doing or not doing. And create reports from that. Those are really good to be intended to be formed within Q-Hub. Especially if you have approvals, some people sometimes get confused. They'll have a form, let's say it's an audit checklist like a health and safety site checklist. They might want those to be approved by people at the end. But when you approve those things, it's done as a whole. So what I mean by that is if someone has a checklist and they want to have it checked over by someone before it's complete, that is checking the form in its entirety rather than individual elements. So if a single approval is needed, forms still work really well. We have a setting to manage approvals on the whole form that will either let it go back to be edited or continue and be submitted. So that covers reasonably well sort of how forms should be used.

So the question is then how should a process be used and when should it be used? Well, processes within a business can be described as very top level business processes that describe how your business operates or it can be specifically steps that the business should follow in order to get a thing done. So where you would have a very top level business process, for example it might be a business process or procedure you've got talking about how you manage sales. So it could be something like step one is lead comes in from a website. Step two is the lead is communicated to through various channels. Step three is this assessed. Step four it goes into your CRM. So those sorts of processes that describe the general business are better in the info process tool which we'll cover in another demo and which we've actually got some improvements coming to as well. So keep an eye out. But the Process Hub is really designed for task, or actually the doing. So let's say for example you have a non-conformance report. So I use this example a lot because it's a very common example that we cover. So you might have a non-conformance procedure which is a written document part of your QMS that covers how you manage non-conformances from the report being raised and the roots that can come from to how you should manage the triage of that non-conformance, so categorizing it by the type of non-conformance and how long it should take for each step. You might then talk about the teams who are responsible for investigation and corrective actions and then you will probably have various approval stages within that non-conformance sort of business process. Then you would traditionally have a non-conformance form like a document and then a register in the background to track the data and the actions. So in Q-Hub that is a perfect example, which is why it's on the side of processes there, of something that should be a process. So it's when there's multiple steps of a document that is traditionally filled out by different departments that you're emailing around or if there's specific time frames things should be done within and especially if that work is done sequentially. So quality department does this bit, once that's signed off it goes to the engineering team, once that's signed off it goes to the sales team, if they reject it back it goes back to the quality. Those types of activities are perfect for Process Hub.

So now we know sort of when to use a process. There's some top tips we can give and then I'm actually going to show you sort of a worked example of this. So bear with me. It won't all be death by PowerPoint. So try not to add decision steps just for the sake of it or when you're trying to categorize things. So I'll show you that in more detail. But also avoid creating steps as sections. So if you think of a non-conformance form, you normally have corrective action section, preventative action sections, you maybe even have an observation section at the end of it. So in a digital process flow world, it kind of works a bit different and you'll see that in a minute. But one of the biggest things to try not to do is this fourth bullet point: don't duplicate the same fields, so the questions. So if you're asking in step one, what is the product? Or if you've got a decision and you've got steps sort of two and two A, don't ask the same questions. Don't say what is the product in this one and what is the product in this one because it causes problems with KPIs and you can't combine that information together. So I'll show you how to do that properly. And then things to keep in mind: condense fields into as minimal steps as possible. Try not to make a new step if there's no need to and also keep common fields at the top, which ties into that duplication.

So what I'm going to do now is actually show you some examples of how this works. So I'm just going to, if you bear with me, open this bit up. So you should be seeing my Process Hub page now. So the Process Hub, if you want to know sort of how to get into the Process Hub or anything like that, we'll come back to that in another demo or you can look at some of our other help guides. But specifically today, I just want to show you a bad example of a process. So I'm going to open this process. And just to start with, you see I've got investigation, containment, all these different sections, and then I have some reference fields in the table. So this is information we're pulling out. Do you see how we've got multiple defect types? We've got select the product here. We've got select the customer, select product again, defect type again. So this is because we have tried to duplicate fields in multiple steps.

So let me show you how that looks. So I see this all the time when customers try and sort of build processes for their businesses and they're trying to automate engineering quality department. So they might have something like this. So department information, let's say the first step you're going to ask people what department they work in. Okay, so A, B and C. That's okay, that's fine. But what happens next is they then create a whole new step in order to split the process into different things. So you know traditionally in your head you might think okay well if it's a customer, supplier or internal, we're going to do different things. So therefore you create almost like a Visio style chart where we have a type of issue and we create a process flow route for each of these. So then if it's a supplier it goes down this route. If it's internal it goes into this step and so on with customer. So the problem with this is you end up duplicating information and it makes it complicated for users to work with. So if you imagine the user is going to pick the department then click next, then they're going to pick supplier, customer or internal then click next, then they're going to click supplier and they're going to put the product, if the product is related to a supplier, add some details, maybe add some defect types also, and then if it goes to customer they might also want to select the product. So that's fine because you would want to set the product in both scenarios. But what you've actually done, if you think of the process like a big database, you've created two separate sort of columns in your Excel spreadsheet. Here we've got products one and now we've got products two. So we really want to avoid that and I'll show you how we can just in a moment.

Next we have something like this: containment. So is containment needed? Yes or no? There is a time and a place for something like this. But generally speaking, to things like containment or just extra little bits and bobs that need to be done, you don't need whole decision steps like this, especially when both routes end up coming back to the same point. Okay, so you can see I've got containment. Is the containment needed? Yes, we're going to send that to someone, describe the action, ask them to put when actions were completed. It's a little bit cumbersome. Once that's done or they say there's no containment needed, we'll go into investigation.

Another common problem I see is having forms nested everywhere in a process. Just remember, if the form is purely to capture extra fields or information and you don't want to segregate that data, just have the form fields in the process. So don't have this, whatever questions you're going to ask in the form, just put them in the process and it becomes like a master, a master process, a master document.

Then we've got another stage for CAPA. So we've got CAPA descriptions and a date. I see all the time it's a description of the preventative actions and the date they were completed. Very sort of old school way of doing things. Want to avoid that if we can. Then I see sign off sections. So sign off goes to someone. If yes, it carries on. If they're not happy, we reject it back to CAPA. And then once that's done, we say sign off is done. We go to the name, date, and signature. So you may at first look at this and think, "Wow, this is great. This is really going to help me categorize my data. It's going to help me sort of manage the whole flow," which is true. But let me just show you the equivalent but made in a much, much better way.

So I'm just going to come back out of this and I'm going to go back to my good example. So this basically has all the same information and it will achieve the same thing with the same flow but in a much, much better way. So if you look at the flowchart for this one, I actually only have three steps. Okay? And it will do all of the same things. So if I go back, you can see on this page as well, I've cleared it up nicely. I've now only got single results for each of my sort of issues, non-conformances, CAPA, whatever you need to use the process for. I've only got one column for each.

And now if I go into my versions to show you how this looks, you'll see what I've done. So to start with I have report information and I have, instead of a decision step, I'm just having an option there, a dropbox option for customer, supplier and internal. Now what we do here is we use the hide/show logic. So you can see here I've got hide/show logic. You click more hide/show and we say we only want to show this if the type of issue is supplier. And now these fields will only appear when the customer is selected, when the supplier is selected, again when the customer is selected. So that eliminates all of the first sort of decision routes that were in the bad example. And it will do the same thing. It will only show or only capture that information when it's needed and the user won't have to keep clicking next. It'll just happen instantaneously.

Then for things like containment or little actions that shoot off during a process, simple thing: is containment needed? Yes or no? Rather than a whole decision step. Again, hide/show logic. If containment is a yes, then we're going to show an action component and we use this action group. And I'll show you how that looks in a moment. But that one step now covers the three or four steps and routes that we had in our bad example just in one step.

Then what we can do is we can send the investigation to someone. So here we would advise something like this. So the investigation is described, attach evidence, put the root cause in. Who should do the corrective actions as a user? We would avoid this as well. This is just an example, but I wouldn't personally put this in here because the data or the user who needs to do something is going to be captured elsewhere. So what we'll do here, oh just a little point as well. You'll notice you can even hide and show fields or questions in steps based on fields in other steps. So for example, the defect type we capture in step one. If that is damaged, then we're also going to ask them for joint number. Okay.

So we've got step one simplified. Now we've got our investigation. And now we can send CAPA to someone. And the CAPA step is going to have corrective action group in here, comments. And we're going to use the process step approval feature to approve the overall process by checking the last step. So we can either accept or reject it. And it's going to automatically go to the managers. And once they approve it, it will automatically close this process.

So I'm just going to show you how much simpler this is to actually use. So if I go back to our bad example and imagine your operators are starting it. So they're going to pick, I'm in department C for example. Then click next. Then we're going to say it's a customer problem and Ethan needs to look at this. Ethan gets it. He now looks at it and says okay this is for RS, is the customer. The products affected is a car rod. Put the details in and then put a defect type. Then he's going to click next again. Is containment needed? No, it's not needed. Then it goes to investigation. Now, we don't want him to have to do this, but he can click to open up an add. And we can prepopulate this data from the process, but again, we're just separating data out unnecessarily. Once that's done, he can click complete the step, goes to CAPA. You'd have to describe it and put the date in. Can't really send anyone else actions in this way. And then again, it goes down again to sign off and it goes through. So we've got lots and lots of different steps in this one.

Now, my simplified example, you'll see how much easier this is. So we're going to click start. The user can put in the report title, which we always recommend: add a title field. So this might be Q-Hub issue found. Which department do you work in? You pick your department from a dropdown. Type of issue. So watch what happens. If I click customer, the customer options open up. Customer return. If I pick internal, they disappear. If I pick supplier, supplier field opens up. So now we can pick very, sort of we can make a very intuitive and easy to use form. Is containment needed? No. Send it to the investigation. Ethan needs to investigate it. Easy as that. All of that covered in one step. It also comes out nicer when you PDF it.

So the investigation, if I just skip this stage and we go straight to the containment actions. So we recommend that you use these actions as much as possible. So you can just click create an action. I can create a task and I can say go and check the line or XYZ parts. You can add some more details. You can even add it to a CAPA project. And we're going to send that to Bob. And I'm going to click done.

Now, the beauty of using these actions in the processes: if I click back to my main process, it actually holds all of the actions in this little window. So you can see any additional actions that are happening in parallel to your processes and it indicates them here with the lightning bolt action sign. If I click on one of these and I mark it as complete. So if I say this is actually now completed and I just refresh my page, you'll now see that that action has gone green and it's disappeared from the live action section. So this is a really good example of how action should be used, of how processes should be built. Hopefully that's cleared up a lot of questions that you may have had about how processes should work.

So the next thing we're going to do is cover some, or quite a unique use case that a lot of people struggle to understand how to put together, but it's actually quite powerful and it's really useful, especially for something like supplier approval. It's when you want to send a customer or send an external party a form as part of your process. Okay. So how we do it, we create the flow. We create a form as well that you want to send. We change it to an external step. We pick the people field to send it to. We link them together. And then we can actually just start using it. So again, I'm just going to show you this one straight away. So I'm just going to come out of here and we are going to go back and you should now see my process screen again. Okay.

So I'm going to go to my new supplier process. Going to go into my versions and I'm going to show you how it works. So this is a really common example. So the first step is someone wants to raise a new supplier. So we have the supplier's name. They'll be asked to put that in. The reason for the new supplier. The type of supplier is a nice field to add to have here, but obviously you can add whichever fields you want, whatever data you need to capture.

Then we have this people field. So it's really important that this is a people field. Okay? Because this helps us to send things. So in the people field, we are going to capture first name, last name, email, and you don't have to put the mobile in, but it's possible and you can. And then we always suggest make this a required field. Okay? So like I've done here, they have to fill this in whenever they're requesting for a new supplier.

Now what we do next, we have a supplier questionnaire step. So this is just, I've named it this. So I can name it supplier, I can name it supplier form instead. Doesn't really matter. But the step type is a form step. Okay. So how you change that, you go up to the top and you change it from a field-based step to a whole form. Okay? So you pick the form step that opens this box and it asks you to pick the form. So I've picked my supply evaluation form.

Another time I can show you how we map all this data together so you can minimize sort of any manual input needed. We can add reminders so that whoever gets this form is going to do this every 10 days. And you always have to pick who the person is that's going to receive the next step after the external step. So what I mean is let's say someone raises a request, it then goes to the supplier. When it comes back, you need to tell it who it's going to come back to. So it could be the person who started the process, it could be the supplier evaluation team, it could be anyone, but you have to put someone in there. So in this bit, it won't let you do it if you don't put someone in.

So once we've done that, so step one, filter process. Step two, change it to a form step and add your form and link it to the next one. And then go back to the first step and you'll now see this option. So by default, it'll be turned off until you activate it. But by default, this is what you want to do. So you want to click turn this on and it will say send the next step to external users from people field. So you pick the people field which is this one here and then you click save and this now means that when you put a person in this stage, the next stage, the next form is going to be sent to that person to fill it out.

So I've got an example of one that I did earlier. So I've said newspaper, someone wants Q-Hub, of course, because we are the best compliance platform in the world. And I've put my personal details in here. So don't all just message me at one time. But these are the details. So you would put the supplier's name in and the supplier's email, that type of thing. It will then show you that this has gone to the supplier. So you can see the form has been sent to Ethan Bryce. So that will come through to the supplier in an email. And I'm just going to show you a quick example of how that email would look.

So if I go, so here you go. You should see my email window. So it says, "Hi, Ethan Bryce. You've been invited to fill out a supplier evaluation form from Q-Hub." If I click on this, it will take me to a web page where I'll see the form and I can fill it out and the supplier can go back and forth and be and fill it out a little bit one day, come back to it another day. So it's an open link and it will last until you delete it or close it. Okay, so that's how it works for the supplier. And then going back to the actual process itself, I come back to here. So going back to the process itself. Once that's done, it will automatically. So if I just simulate it being completed, it will automatically go to the next stage. So now I've got approval and rejection. So in real life, you might have a lot more questions here. It could be a risk assessment you carry out. It could be lots of other different options of categorization or details that you want to capture. But let's say we approve it. We've then got an automation set up in the background which I again show you on another video. But that automation will actually add this supplier into our supplier register. So I can go into my register, into my new supply register and we can have it automatically add the supplier into this page. Okay.

So I will do a whole use case on supplier management and how Q-Hub can help you to manage that as easy as possible. But we'll go through that another time. So we have covered how to manage a supplier from and using that form to do that and we have also looked at how to simplify or some best practice tips for processes.

So thank you for watching that with me. But as promised, we have a little bonus video at the end. So let me just open that up. Oh, one final thing. One final thing from me that I almost forgot to mention. Just wanted to say this: if it looks too complicated, it probably is. Okay? If the process looks too complicated, you probably overcomplicated it. So try and keep it as simple as possible. And now let me show you something really cool with some of the AI features that will be released very, very shortly. Okay.

So I'm just going to stop sharing and open my AI demo.

Okay. So what I would like to show you all is something that we have been working on that's going to come to Q-Hub in many different forms. So something that we have established since we've started and over the different years is that people sometimes struggle moving to a digital system from their existing QMS platform or from their other systems or maybe they're even starting from scratch and they want to be able to build a system really quickly and they want to do it well. Now with the sort of emergence of AI we knew that this is something or a tool that we could use to help customers build things faster and build them better. Okay. So what we are releasing is generative AI features to help you build forms, processes, audit requirements, so audit questionnaires and templates and QDOs and some other things as well that will be coming, as well as some other fancy AI sort of compliance checks. But let me show you an example of how we can build a process using AI.

So very soon, when you click new process, you'll have the option to build from the start, build from scratch, pick a template or build using AI. So I can pick this and I can pick to upload a file. So you can either just give it instructions of what process you would like it to build and it will do its best at building it. But we do recommend if you've got any templates or you have a procedure that describes how something should be done to use that. So I'm just going to show you. Hopefully you can see an incident response policy PDF on the page. This is an internal policy showing how we manage incident reporting and accidents according to ISO 27001. Okay. So it goes into the triage, the containment actions. It goes into all of our different categories for incidents. Talks about CAPA actions, communications, and notifications. Okay, so I'm just highlighting some key elements, especially lessons learned.

So what the AI will allow us to do is actually click attach and upload that incident policy. It will default and say make a process out of the attached file. Now if you want to you can add more information than this, but in the background we've done a lot of work to try and automatically get the best output from whatever you upload. But you can add more instructions if you want to. Then you just simply click done. So this can take, it can take 5 seconds, it can take two minutes sometimes. We're working on the speed before we release it.

But what this will do, if I jump to my blue Peter, here's one I made earlier. And I will come back to this just to prove that it does work. But this built earlier, this built this process flow. So from a document describing how the business runs, it actually built this straight away. So if you go onto the process, you can see it created all of my different fields. It included my incident categories found from the incident response policy. It even did the dates of the incident, the time, locations if applicable. And it gave me all that information. Then it's figured out that I need to impact assess it. So it's saying if it's critical, high, medium impact, it's going to go to investigation. If it's a low impact, it's going to go through the normal operations procedure, which is exactly what my incident response policy says. And then each of these have different options as part of it. So I've got options to add my files, text area. I've got my lessons learn section where I can add final documentation and capture more information. So it's basically built an entire process for me just based on a document.

If I jump back to my AI one. So there we are. It's done again. And you see this time it's done it slightly differently. So this is the consistency that we're trying to improve before we release it to everyone to make sure it gives the best results. But again, you can see we've got incident triage, we've got triage actions and decisions with different routes. So this time it's gone to low severity. So you might need to tweak it a little bit, but it should help you by the time we release it make processes or make other things on the application from what you already have and do it really quickly and really well.

And to actually start using it, you can just click save. We click done and now we actually have a live process built from AI from document in minutes. I click start. You can see I can actually go in and fill this out. It's got references to my policy. I can start picking information and then I can start building KPIs from this immediately. So that's just a sneak peek at one of our new features that is coming. We're really excited about AI and what it's going to do for the platform and to be honest just how it's going to totally change the game in terms of how or the capabilities of a QMS and what it can actually do for a company and not just sort of use it to create things. We've got big plans for AI across the platform.

So just to wrap up, that was your little sneak peek. What should you do now? So if you're a customer, use this as a sort of a prompt to go and review your processes and see if you can improve them based on the tips that I've given you today. If you're on a support plan, then just ask us on the next call to actually help you do this, and we'll go through and help simplify your processes. Don't forget to ask for specific things in your support catchup course.

So if you're not a customer, if you're a consultant, if you're just interested in what Q-Hub does and you want to have a go with this, just drop the sales email an inbox or you'll be sent this webinar after and we'll post it on LinkedIn. So if you watch the webinar to the end, you're going to see this code that I'm showing you now. So if you email us with this code of web-proc, we'll actually help you set up a trial and build a process with you for free. Okay?

So you can have a go and see if this is something that you want to use as well. Really appreciate everyone who's joined to watch this today. I appreciate you joining. It makes me feel better about it. And I just like to say if you've enjoyed it, please keep an eye out for the next couple of masterclasses we're going to do. We're going to be doing a lot more webinars to come, but particularly masterclass style webinars that show you how the platform works and how it can help sort of automate and streamline and make compliance easier essentially. So we've got registers coming up, asset management coming up, and audits as well. So guys, again, thank you for watching. Thank you for the comments. Any questions that I didn't cover, I'll email you or respond to you after. But again, thank you everyone and I'll see you on the next webinar.

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