Master class - Register hub

Okay, everyone, welcome to the new master class. So this master class is going to particularly focus on the Register Hub. So what we're going to be looking at today is how you can get best use out of the Register Hub, but we're also going to focus on some things where you might not want to use the Register Hub because there's other tools in the application that are better suited.

I'm going to start by sharing my screen as usual just to take you through a couple of slides to give you an overview of what we're going to be covering today. You should all now be seeing the Unlock the Power of Registers homepage.

In particular, what I'm going to cover on this webinar is when to use a register and when you don't need to use them. Examples of what you don't want to do with registers and things to avoid. Also, we can look at how we can use the register automations in more detail. Specifically, some of the features like Get the Data, which is a really useful and powerful tool that can save a lot of time on admin. So we'll spend a bit of time looking at that. And then we're also going to look at how you can use the hide, show, and the view feature of registers to make it as user-friendly as possible for the different parties involved in managing your register. And then at the end, I'm going to show you the KPI options we have for registers just so that everyone knows how to make the KPIs as well.

To start off with, we just want to talk a little bit about how you might decide whether a register is needed or not. So in the application you've got forms, you've got processes, and you've got registers. These are all tools that can be used in different ways and sometimes there is an overlap, but it really depends on what you're trying to do. But what I'd like to focus on today is some examples that we have seen people use registers for that really they'd be better suited in the Form Hub or in the Process Hub.

A couple of examples of that are inspection records, inspection logs, or any type of checks. What we've seen people do sometimes is create a register and each line in that register is like a check that they're getting someone to fill out each day. That would be something better used as a form.

I've got an example here of something that I've seen many times being used over the years. So this is an example of an inspection log I've seen someone make. So they might have the inspector's name here, the date of inspection, the results, and then like a status that they can pick whether the inspection passed or failed. I've even seen people go into the register and they might have in some cases like a picture. So pictures of the check. We've also seen they have additional columns like it could be to actually capture the machine ID things like that.

So what I'm getting at here is when we don't want to use a register is anything that you're going to ask multiple people to log into Q-Hub. Maybe your operators on the shop floor. It could be different people who are performing checks. We don't want them to have to come to Q-Hub, go to a register, click add a row to the bottom or to the top of our register, pick themselves, have to upload attachments, machine ID, maybe machine IDs, put the date in that they're inspecting something, the results, and then mark things as pass and fail and write any actions in and due dates.

The reason this is not a good use for registers is because essentially what you've created is a form. What you need to create is a form and then the register just acts as the data behind the form.

So an example of a better way to do something like this: any type of checks on machines or shop floor checks, you want to go to the Form Hub and you want to make a form something like this one. If you enable AI, you can use our new AI tool. So you can just ask it, "Build me a shop floor inspection form for coolant checks on our machines," and it will whip up something like the one that I've made here. So now you can have shortcuts. You can even do it on your mobile phone or your tablet where people can fill out an inspection or a check using the form.

So they click add an entry. Now we've got all of our different questions. We can pick our machine ID, maybe link it to Asset Hub. We can mark the checks. We can say no, there's a problem. We can even raise an action within the check itself and then sign it off.

Historically, people have these checks as Excel spreadsheets. They've got guys on the shop floor filling out paper, and then they come back and write in all of their inspections and put them into Excel so that they can run some analytics and KPIs. But you don't need to do that because you're creating extra work. Create a form, use the form to fill it out. The form itself acts as the database or the register.

You can see here all the details from the form that was filled out. It's very similar to the register that I showed you. We can have pass and fail, yes, pass, yes, or no on the form as well. And then you can also click, with forms, don't forget the entries table which does give you a full sort of register view of every field in that form that you can download into an Excel file if you wanted to.

So that's really something that I just wanted to make clear: a bad example of using Register Hub.

Registers are not good for logs, checks, repeat inspections, or something you want to do. What they are very good at though are things like managing your supplier certificates. Approved supplier lists are also another very good use case. Legal registers as a register are great. The only downside at the moment is obviously there's no way to check if legislation changes. However, with some of the new AI tools that we are building, this will actually be much, much better, and so it's worth having your legal registers as a register because when we add the AI options to the register it's going to make it even better.

Risk registers are great for Register Hub. People and training or certificates—for now, Register Hub is a great place to put these. We are building a People Hub which will do training management in a very specific way to help with skills matrices and things like that. But registers, for now, is still a very good tool, much better than Excel, for managing your training.

Facility certification or management is another good use case I've seen quite a lot. So, for example, you might have a log of all of the different sites or a log of all the different facility activities that you have to manage. It could be fire extinguishers. It could be different things like that that maybe you want to manage externally. So it could be different companies that own these buildings, but you are responsible for the compliance of all of them.

Interested parties register and risk and opportunities register. I tried to stick to examples within the ISO world because they're quite common use cases for the Register Hub, but it's not limited to that. It's more just to give you some examples of what registers is very good for.

So I'm just going to jump back now into Register Hub and we're going to focus on some of the functionality that I talked about at the beginning. So really getting into the detail a little bit more.

Okay, so on Register Hub, I'm going to take you through some examples. The first one I'm going to show you is a training register. So this is a really good example. The way to set a training register up is to have the employees name as a user field. Then have the type of training that you require or cover. So this can be a list of the different training activities for this particular training register. Manager responsible is a nice one for running the automations. Then we've got things like the date, the expiry, training certificate attachments, and then we have the status field.

So just some quick tips straight off the back that you might not know about with any of our registers: if you right-click the more button, you have a couple of options. So we've got pin to left and pin to right. When you pin something to the right, it will always be present on the right-hand side. So you can see I can scroll left and right, but I'm now always going to see the expiry and the status column here.

Another few quick tips for registers: we have the info button. So when you click this info button, it actually opens up what we call the row drawer. In the row drawer, you can add comments. So I can say, for example, "@Bob, can you help organize this?" And if you send that, Bob will now get a notification linked to this row so that he can then have a look at what you're talking about.

You can also go to the actions tab and trigger actions straight from this register row. So let's say there's some training that you needed to facilitate or you wanted some evidence of the training. You could click to start a form. You could pick a specific form that you want to do and send it to someone else via an email if it's an external register or an external check. You can also just directly upload any files you want to into the register. So if you had evidence of someone's training or evidence, for example, of someone's supplier certification, you can upload files.

And then you have a very important feature which is the row history. So you'll see that all of the rows in our registers actually capture the history of everything that happens to them. So this is really, really good for compliance, particularly on your audit when you want to show, okay, when did someone change from valid to due soon, and it will show you that this was from an action. So like automatically, that's what that means. It happened automatically. The cell status was updated to the 30th of May, making it valid.

So that's just sort of a bit of familiarity with the Register Hub.

So now getting into some other examples, we've got something: if I go to my favorites, we have a supplier register. So this is again another really good example. So we can have the different suppliers that you may have set up, the supplier statuses, the review date of your suppliers, the certification that they hold, and then importantly, the contact email for your supplier.

So if you want to include or link your registers to other things, I'm going to do a session another time on specifically how to build a supplier management system within Q-Hub. This is where you would use a register and you would end up with something like this. If I click the info on this line, you can see that this line of our supplier register was created from a supplier process. So this supplier process here triggered and autocreated the supplier register.

So the reason this is so good as a supplier register using our Register Hub feature is because of the automations. So let me show you what I mean.

So to start playing with the automations or changing it, you need to put the register in a state of unpublished issue. Then you can go into the automation section and this way you can start to build or manage the automations that you have.

So I'm just going to show you a really, really powerful automation that you can set up. So if you go into when today is 30 days less or before—so that basically means we've got 30 days before we need to review something. We can see that the current settings that are applied here is when today is 30 days or less. So within the 30-day window from our register date, we're going to change the status to review due soon, which is great. This is an obvious thing that you'd like to do—change a status. But more than that, to really gain some value from using the Register Hub and to save you some administration time, what we want to do is actually ask the supplier for the certificate.

And this could apply to some of the other examples we gave. It could be ask your employee for the evidence of their training that was due. It could be asking a supplier. It could be asking a contractor for a certificate that they hold if you work with companies that do contracting.

So you can click here, add an action. And the action type that we want to use is the request data. Okay, so the bottom one: request data. Now when you pick request data, you can manually input the email. So, for example, if you had a certain third party that was always responsible for managing certification, you could do that. But in this case, use the send to email. And now we can pick our contact email. So what this means is for every one of these lines—or every supplier in our register—there is an email column for each line.

So the automation, when let's say Global Steel Company needs to be reminded or needs to be requested to send their latest supplier certificate, the contact email is going to be used. So we can pick a contact email. We can then say set a due date. So we can set the due date based on a date in the review date column, or it could be the certification date, or it could just be x number of days after we've sent it. And then we can use the due date to trigger reminders. So remind my supplier every 30 days, or maybe less than that, every 10 days, until they have completed the form to send me their supplier details.

But then this is the really important bit. Okay, so we want to send an email to the contact email for the supplier. What do you want them to upload? So we would like them to upload the new review date and evidence of their certificate. So this might be the expiry date in your register if it's for certification. So we want those two things to be filled out by the supplier.

Okay, so we can click done. Now we can give it a subject line. So it might be—let's say we're Q-Hub. So, "Q-Hub request for a new certificate."

We can leave an instruction message. Something that we recommend in here is to put like a nice message about you wanting the supplier approval, but then leave your personal or your company email that's responsible for managing supplier management. So if anyone has a problem, they have a contact email other than the Q-Hub mailing address that they can reach out to if there's any problems.

So you can put your message in here, and then you can also pick the supplier name and let's say the date that they were approved, the renewal date, and their current status. So by ticking these at the bottom of the email they receive, they are going to see the details that you have within the register.

So, for example, if I'm sending it to Global Steel, they'll see my subject line. They'll see my message. They'll then have an autobuilt box by us for them to click to go to a link to upload the review date and the certificate. And at the bottom, it will say reference information. It will say supplier name and it will have Global Steel Company. It will have date approved, and then the date that they've approved it. So this just helps. If your suppliers have multiple standards, you can include that the scope or the standard is attached in there so that they know what you're referring to.

So this data—this data request—is really, really helpful. And then we have another thing that we can do at the end of our actions, which is perform actions on complete. So once they have filled out the request for data, you can actually say once that happens, I would like to then change the status of the row to maybe reviewed, or you can have another status for yourself, which might be to be checked. And then you can do something like this: you can send a notification.

You might have Bob responsible for supplier management, and you can say "Supplier uploaded search. Please check." And we can click done.

So now what's going to happen is whenever your suppliers, or your contractors, or your training—it's 30 days or less before the review date, the renewal date, or certificate expiry date—we're going to change the status to review soon, and we're going to actually ask them for this information and we're going to save that. Now, once you ask them for this information, you can go into the info box and under actions, it will actually show you. We don't have any set up right now, but it will show you an example of one that has been sent out. And it will give you the ability to cancel it if it's gone wrong or to send them a reminder manually as well.

So there is evidence that that has happened and been sent out within the info, within the action section.

Okay, so that's an example of some of the automations. There's lots of other automations that can be used. In particular, the most popular ones are obviously to change the review status or to change the status fields. So, for example, we have when the due date—so you pick your date and then you set your sort of logic. So when the review date is maybe today, or when today is past the review date, so if it becomes overdue, you can then go in, add an action, change the status, change it to let's say overdue. And then we can add another action to send a notification to your manager to say that now we've got suppliers overdue.

So the dates and the status changes, the notifications, the emails are very useful. It just helps sort of automate those things and remind people of when things need to be done. But the really, really beneficial one is that request to data automation.

So I'm just going to save that as it is and come out and now show you some additional uses.

So let's say you have a register and the register is something like this: risk and opportunities. So in your register, you might have consequences, likelihood, scoring. So if you're not familiar with how to do this, we have used the weighted fields. So even though they are colored drop-down options here in the background, we have fields with weighted numbers behind them. And then we have used a calculation field to create our score, which just multiplies the consequence and likelihood.

And then we have used our automations to tell the register that if the score is between a certain number—so, for example, if it is less than or equal to five—then the row status should be low. So that's how we can automatically have the risk status populated, and then you can just duplicate this across for any remedial risks that you have.

But what we want to do here is understand how we can make the registers more easy to use, easier to see, for maybe different people. It could be managers, it could be other staff members that you want to provide access to with the register.

So let's say, for example, you are going to review this with your senior management team—your risks and opportunities. They might not want to have the full detail of the opportunity, the risk. They might not want to see the consequence and likelihood. They just simply want to see what are the activities, what is the current risk status, what are you controlling, and therefore what is the remedial risk. This just helps to bring critical information on the page for people.

So to do that, what we are going to do is we are going to click the more button on the column, and then we're going to click hide. And we're going to do it again. So risk, we're going to click hide again. We can to do this faster: we can go to manage columns and we can just deselect the things that we don't need to see. So now I just have activity and risk status. I want to leave my controls, and then I just want to see my remedial risk score. So there we are.

So now I just have very top-level information on my risk register.

So what we can do is we can actually save this as a view. So we go to more—sorry, we go to save the view—and we can call this a simplified risk view and make it a public view so other people can see it. Private means only you will be able to access this view. So we want to make public. So once I save that, you'll now see that the top of the register becomes a dropdown box. So I can go to my display all view and I can show everyone this, or I can swap and I can go to my simplified risk view.

So you can imagine how you can create a lot of different views here to break the register and the data within the register up into more user-friendly ways.

For example, if I go back to display all, you might want another view that helps you to break things by the risk status. So that here we can use the group feature. So we can group by risk status, and it's now going to show us the different levels that we have, and on the dropdown it will expand. So I can again click all rows, save as new view, and I can group the risk status together again, just help in jumping between different views.

You can also apply filters and save as views, which is really, really helpful if you've got large registers holding lots of data.

For example, I'm just going to jump back to my supplier, go to the supplier register. So in this scenario, you might want a way to immediately see what is overdue. So I can go to my filters. I can type in overdue, and it will look for anything overdue. I can save this view publicly as overdue suppliers, and I can click save. So now I can very quickly jump between all of my suppliers and overdue suppliers. Just makes things more user-friendly and easier to do.

So once you've created a couple of these views that you want to use or manage, you can now use these views in shortcuts and workspaces.

So I'm going to show you an example of that. So if you're an admin or a standard user and you go to your Work Hub and we go to one of our spaces, I've got a supplier management space set up. So I'm just going to show you how you might use one of these views. So I can click edit dashboard. I can go shortcut, and now I can pick from my view. So I can now type in overdue, and I now see my view to go to my overdue suppliers. If I click add, I can fit this in somewhere. Let's put it here and click save.

So now if you have a dashboard that is shared with your team or maybe your senior management team, and they have something like this, instead of having to go straight to the supplier register and see everything, they can now just go to overdue suppliers, and it's going to immediately open on this view.

So these views—they're not just for Register Hub. They are also in processes and forms, but in particular, this view feature is very, very helpful for managing what people see and making it as easy as possible for people to get to the information they need with as few clicks as possible.

So just finally, I would talk you through one final type of view management that can be set up. So if I go back to my risks and opportunities, we do have another option which is called the group feature. So if I go to a risk register, and I'm just going to jump back actually to the other one. Yeah, this one here.

So I want you to imagine you have a large company, or even a small company, and your risks are broken up into maybe departments. It could be your top-level strategic business risks. It could be operational risks. It could be risks by country, or by source of risk. However you break it up.

So what we can do is we can actually have this group feature on our register. So to create a group feature, you go into the more settings, and you go settings. And now we can go into row access. So if you enable row access, you can create new access groups. So I've got an example here of countries or sites, but you might instead have an ops group. And you can then assign users, or a group of users. So if I call this one managers, I can assign groups of people or individual users to a row access group.

Okay, I'll click done. What this means is I can then for every row, assign groups that have access to this register. So if I was to assign this particular row only to the ops group, anyone that logs in that has access or is part of the user list in this ops group is only going to see this particular line. Okay? They're only going to see this row, no matter where they log into the register, whether it's a portal, whether it's from a dashboard.

If people are in more than one group—so if someone, let's say Bob, is in the ops row group and is also in the USA row group—he would see ops and USA lines.

So this feature is very, very, very helpful for when you have large amounts of data in a register but you want to break up what people can see. So, for example, I've seen this used in training registers where you have departmental row groups so that a department manager can only see the training items for his department. I've seen this used also in risk registers from the very top level, where you have operational risks, financial risks, compliance risks. You create groups for those categories so that people only have to manage or review their own risks.

It's a very, very useful feature.

And another sort of option, if you didn't want to set up the groups, is we have a quick and easy option to only show users rows they are found in. So what this means is if you set up a column, if I go here, if I set up a new column and in that column I make it a user field and I pick a person, the only row that Ethan is currently going to see is going to be the top row. So you can actually manage row access instead of with groups. You can actually manage it just with the user. So if I pick three people, these three people are going to see this row.

So it's just some helpful options there to show you how to best use, to best manage the access and usability of our register features.

So just back to our presentation.

I've taken you through some examples of how registers can be used, some of the automation features that we have. Remember, we have the request data feature. We have the automations and notifications that can be triggered from registers. We've looked at ways or things that you would not use a register for. And we've also talked about how to create views, use the filter, use the hide columns to simplify your registers, and make it easier to work with on a daily basis.

So what should you do next? Well, customers, use this opportunity to review your registers and to improve them. There may be registers that you have that you actually need to get rid of and make a form. There may be things that you didn't think about using a register for that you now know that you can, because of the different access settings.

So if you want to support a plan or we have some set up with you, please feel free to bring any questions up, and then we can talk to you on them.

If you're watching this and you're not currently a customer, please feel free to email us with any questions if you'd like to know more about how the application works, or just drop us a message wherever you're watching this and we'll get in touch and show you how the platform works in more detail.

This won't be the last of the webinars for Register Hub. We have an asset management master class next, then we have an audit hub master class, and then we'll start circling back around to the hubs again.

We're also going to focus the next round of webinars on specific use cases. So we're going to be working our way through the ISO framework use cases first. So, for example, supplier management, non-conformances, auditing, and how you can best use Q-Hub to manage your ISO standards. And then we're going to go into more detail on specific, more niche problems that customers have solved with Q-Hub, and then we're going to share those on the webinars as well.

So thank you all for joining. I look forward to seeing you on the next webinar.

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