Creating our process on Seliom
From idea to automation in minutes
Head over to the Processes page and click on Add new process. Give your process a meaningful name such as Time-off Requests.
After your process is created, click on it to view it.
The first step in Seliom is to write a description of your process for others to understand. We provide a powerful text editor to make this easy for you.
Head over to the Workflow tab and then click on New workflow. You will now see the Workflow Editor.
You can drag and drop nodes from the left sidebar onto the canvas and connect them however you like!
Our final process will look like this in the editor:
Now that we have drawn our process, let's configure it.
Double click on a node to open its settings. Different types of nodes have different settings that you can adjust:
The Start task represents the first task required to start this process. You can only have one start task per process. They are represented by a yellow node.
In our example, we are going to create a form in the start node that asks for a start date and an end date for our time-off requests.
Double click on the node and configure it the following way:
In the Basic Details tab, give it a name such as Time-off Request.
In the Start Settings tab, indicate the team members who can create time-off requests.
For this demo, make sure to add at least yourself!
Head over to the Form Editor tab, and click on Add Element. You can create different form elements that request the information you need to start a process. For this demo, make sure to have:
A date element, called Start Date, with a Field ID of start_date.
A date element, called End Date, with a Field ID of end_date.
The Field ID is an identifier for your form element. You can reference form elements in other tasks and robots to create powerful business applications.
Tasks are represented by blue nodes and indicate something that needs to be done manually by a team member. The most important configuration options for tasks are:
The form editor, used to indicate the data that must be provided in each task. This is the same as in the Start node.
The task owners, where we indicate who is responsible for performing each task.
For this example, we only have one Task called Update company calendar. This is the task that Clark must perform when Lois approves a Time-off request. Let's go ahead and configure it:
Double click on the task and head over to the Task Owners tab.
In the People section, you should indicate that Clark is the person who should perform this task.
For this task, we are going to leave the Form Editor empty, as we don't require Clark to provide any data.
The form editor and task owners tabs offer a lot of custom options. Explore them to learn more.
Decision nodes help us create conditions in our processes. For example, if a request is approved we might want our process to go a different way than if it was not approved.
We only have one decision node in our process called Approved?. This is a task that is assigned to Lois when a time-off request is created.
Double click on the decision node to configure it.
In the Decision Makers tab, select Lois as the person in charge of making the decision.
In the Decision Options tab, you can see the different options that the person making this decision could select. By default, we always provide Approved and Not Approved. You can leave this options as they appear.
Decision nodes offer advanced automation options with formulas. We are skipping this for now.
Robots (represented by purple nodes), are automatic tasks that do not require human intervention. They can be used to send emails, wait until a specific date, or connect to external systems. In this example, we are using 2 email robots:
When Lois denies a request, the Notify Requestor robot sends an email to the requestor letting him know.
When Lois approves a request, the Notify requestor of approval robot sends a similar email to the requestor letting him know.
The process for configuring both robots is very similar:
First we double click on the Robot node.
Then we click on the Robot Settings tab. We select Email Robot under Seliom Robots.
Under Recipients, we click on Add Recipient, and from the dropdown we select Previous Task Owner. We then select the Start task, called Time-off Request.
The rest of the fields are optional. We recommend adding a Sender's name and the following Body to your email:
You can see we are referencing in our robot the start_date and end_date Field ID from a previous form in our process.
Now that all the steps in our workflow have been configured, we just need to click on the Automate button in our canvas. This will validate our process to ensure there are no errors.
If any warnings or errors pop up, correct them and try again. Otherwise, click on Submit.
You should notice a warning regarding the Update company calendar task, as we did not fill out its form. You can safely ignore it.
Now that our process has been automated, let's see it in action:
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