I'm not aware of anyway to dynamically create a variable.  However, if you created a list to store your departments and roles, you could easily query that list from the workflow and find the appropriate roles based on the departments.  For your scenario you could then store the 3 safety people in a collection variable and loop through it doing whatever actions you needed.  This approach also gives you greater flexibility in the future for updating roles without having to modify the workflow. 

Hi Brendan,

Thanks for the idea.  Actually the roles are static and I do read them in.  It's the assignees that will be dynamic for each role.  There may be 1, none, 5, etc per each role and they will all certainly be different people each time the workflow is called.  I can make this work, but it's a lot of repeated actions within if/then statements and switches which will make the workflow, to quote our new president, "Huge".  This may work well with walls but not workflows ;-)

I don't really see a way around it though

When I said "roles" I meant the person assigned to that role.  So you create a list with 3 columns, Department, Role, Assignee.  You load all your assignee's in the list with the role and department they go with.  You can then query that list in the workflow to get your collection of assignee's.  Then you can do what you need to with those assignee's.  No need to repeat actions.  You use a For Each and then just loop through the collection.  

Hey ‌!

Did ‌'s suggestion help you out? If so, please mark it correct!

Thank you!

Rhia