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There comes a point in every organization where we need to keep growing and the end result is hiring more staff and larger operating budgets.Our teams are telling us that they are simply too busy and do not have capacity to take on new initiatives.Having used K2 extensively for the past 7 years as both a customer and a consultant for customers, I have gained extensive knowledge and insights that I would like to share with you.Most organizations evolve into a workforce suffering from administration overload and fatigue. I bet you have heard about the story of the frog and the boiling water. We go through our daily routines without noticing the gradual changes, which causes all sorts of problems when it is simply too late to remedy them. By our very nature, humans like routines — they make us feel comfortable and we prefer to operate in our comfort zone for a reason. Never let the “slow boiling water” kill you. Business Process Automation has matured immensely and the uptake is increasin

I must have one of the best jobs ever! Could this be due to the fact that:·        I am daily changing the lives of others?·        I am able to build whatever solution I can think of?·        I have absolute confidence in what I promise and will deliver?·        I facilitate change?·        I can do all this in the comfort of my home?How?I am armed with one of the best development tools I have ever came across.K2 is a game changer, every time. I often get asked the question – what is K2 and what can we do with it? I find it difficult to put K2 in a box, since great things are not easily boxed. My response to this question is often, whatever you want - I can create with K2.It is not an HR Tool or a Purchasing Toolset etc., but could be all of that and hence my personal motto:If you can think it, you can build it with K2. After walking the change journey with a few corporates now, I immediately recognize the reaction that I get next – you must be kidding me!The rewarding part of these j

Having been actively developing solutions using K2/SQL as the main vehicle for the last 7 years, I have certainly been able to considerably change the modus operandi of various corporates.I am now completing my latest customer engagement after 12 months of committing 50% of my available time.The times that we find ourselves in, has drastically shifted the mindsets and the trust required to allow remote working and this allowed me to complete the entire outsourcing project whilst only requiring 2 customer visits – ideal when 1700 kms apart.K2 has allowed me to introduce the following benefits into these corporates with relative ease:Visibility, Performance Improvements, Reduced Paper and Easy retrieval of filed documents, Cost Saving, Reduction in Administrative Tasks and so much more.Not only is the turnaround time of solutions lightning fast compared to traditional technologies, but what is attractive, is the reduce resources required.I have now had the privilege of starting green-fie

Having reached the first milestone of my Outsourcing Contract with my new Customer - 45 days, I now have the time to reflect on my experience. What Covid has taught me is that Corporates are a lot more reluctant to spend money without being assured of their investments.I got asked the question this week on what the actual timeframe is for a return on investment when implementing K2. Often the questions are accompanied by comments like: "it is all just promises from Sales" and "how big is your development team?".My first response is always: I am not in Sales and do not have the luxury of a Team to work in and therefore my experiences are real and therefore I am able to reflect as such.As a One-Man Team, I do the Analysis, Database Design, Development, Training, and Support, and obviously, this needs to be factored into what is possible and the answer to this question.I am very fortunate to have had the opportunity to implement automation using this technology at 2 corporates from scratc

As promised at the end of last week, I would give some details pertaining to the Vendor Reconciliation solution that I was asked to design using K2. This again demonstrated the value of a great enabling tool like K2. It also clearly underlines my views on how K2 becomes the glue that connects solutions (referred to as dots). Solutions becomes more complex when connecting 2 or more dots, but it also increases the benefits exponentially.Therefore, single dots add value, but more than one dot is a certain game changer.From a timing point-of-view, I was asked on Friday, a specification approved on Tuesday and the solution ready for implementation on Friday. This demonstrates the agility of K2 and more importantly the value of the journey and the availability of dots to connect.An overview of the Existing ProcessA Creditor clerk receives a Vendor Statement, prints it out as well as the associated invoices. An XL recon gets prepared and the payments are created in the financial system. A pay

Learn the true definition of process excellence and uncover the power of a center of excellence What is it? Process excellence is an orientation and a culture within an organization that aspires to be more effective, efficient and engaged in achieving consistently higher outcomes for everyone involved. That kind of focus needs to be cultivated. It is not the result of a one-off project or a lucky break with a few good hires. It is designed, maintained, and it is driven with those outcomes in mind.What is involved in Operational Excellence? It does not just happen by itself! Growing great processesThink of your process culture like an award-winning garden. Whether you aspire to carefully manicured lawns, artfully trained roses, or a rambling cottage garden of wildflowers, none of it happens without care, planning and ongoing work. It is a team effort that requires the attention of people who know what they are doing and the cooperation of the people who are there every day.The center of

Low Code Automation & Nintex K2 Five Journey By Nintex MVP - Introduction to Nintex K2 Five and its 3 Core Modules - K2 Workspace, K2 Designer, K2 Management Nintex K2 Five is a leading low code platform that enables process automation and application building via low code and citizen development. K2 consists of 3 main consoles. The K2 Workspace, K2 Designer and K2 Management. K2 Workspace is the landing hub of the platform. It is the transit area which a user may use to navigate to the other 2 modules of K2 mentioned above. It also acts as a user’s dashboard, where users may view their inbox for tasks pending their action, links to forms they had created, reports of their process usage and a link to the App store which they may use for downloading apps built by other members of the community to incorporate them within their development process. The workspace may also be customized to specific corporate requirements. K2 Designer is the heart of K2. It is where developers can start

Low Code Automation & Nintex K2 Five Journey By Nintex MVP - Starting your automation journey using low code in 10 steps To kick start your automation, your starting point would be a. An analysis to your corporate processes to identify the number of processes that require automation (Define scope) b. Their current state (fully unautomated or semi automated). To get a glimpse of what is required. To identify how well the processes are defined and whether they are robust or if they require optimization and improvement Identify common sets of data that are redundant across multiple forms e.g. Employee Data which is used on most corporate request forms. This will be helpful in planning for the creation of common objects for reusability which is one of the most beneficial features of low code platforms that eliminate redundant effort Defining the source of truth for reading common sets of data e.g. your company ERP or Active Directory to ensure data integrity and standardization Define

Low Code Automation & Nintex K2 Five Journey By Nintex MVP - Final preparations before starting to build using your low code platform   It is not uncommon that the general average user is excited to jump directly into the build phase of any project as that is where the fruits start to reap. The attractive speed of delivery and the concept of citizen development using low code further increases the urge.   However, before introduction of any change, the definitions of the standards, governance model and quality checks are core to ensure a successful implementation.   Result of not defining the prior, will result in:   1) Developers building custom components for components that are meant to be common. This causes confusion to the end user and results in low satisfaction levels. As an example, each developer may build a custom object for approving or reviewing a task and so the end user would find it frustrating familiarizing him/herself with how to perform a common task   2)System p

Low Code Automation & Nintex K2 Five Journey By Nintex MVP - The concept of low code, citizen development and their vital role in Digital Transformation: The concept of low code in itself is not new. However, the evolution in capabilities of such platforms and the continuous change in how we do business over the past decade has labeled low code platforms as a catalyst to digital transformation positioning them at the top of corporate agendas and a vital component of corporate strategies. Shift in how we do business and the move from the "Classical IT departments" model, where IT was viewed for many years as the sole place to go to for any technology related services or issues, has increased the demand on low code platforms As intuitive as the name may seem, Low code refers to the nature of platforms that allow users to satisfy their build requirements with very limited amount of coding needed if any at all in simpler scenarios. In the front end, code consoles are replaced with a li

Low Code Automation & Nintex K2 Five Journey By Nintex MVP - Business Process Management (BPM) vs Business Process Automation (BPA): In simple terms, automation is non other than the utilization of technology to digitize current manual or semi manual business processes. Business Process Management involves the definition, modelling, creating, enhancing and optimizing a process.Its core involves Business Process Re-Engineering in which business processes are analyzed thoroughly to identify and pinpoint redundancies, unnecessary complexities, contradictions and gaps in an attempt to remodel and make processes more efficient which results in a value addition and a better user experience.Although, automation may provide value addition via optimizing cost and reducing process turn over time, the expectancy of automation and technology to resolve process related issues is a pitfall that is very common. The true problem lies within the quality of process definition and documentation.Proce

I recently had a client ask me if there was a way to automatically update the Role annual costs in Promapp and keep them in sync with their HR/Financial system.  As the roles and their annual costs are manually maintained in Promapp, I thought it would be a good use case for Nintex RPA.   I am going to walk you through the botflow that I built to accomplish this. The botflow I am walking through in this blog is available to download from our Nintex Gallery at this link. The first thing you would need is an export from the HR/Financial system with that lists the roles and costs you wish to update in Promapp. This spreadsheet will be used to search for the roles in Promapp and then update the costs.  The roles listed on the spreadsheet will need to match the roles in Promapp exactly in order for the bot to search for and update them.  Now let’s take a look at the RPA bot, the first thing that the bot is going to do is open the exported workbook and select the data in the worksheet to cre

#RPA #RPASolutions #Robotics #ProcessAutomation #ProcessDiscovery #DigitalTransformation  When you think of RPA, there are several tech-related questions that might come to mind. Will RPA replace my job? Should I be worried about RPA adoption in the workplace? Can RPA even help my department? Check out our answers to the most commonly asked RPA questions below:  1) Is RPA only applicable for IT services?  Automation may have been conceived in the back office but RPA can help the entire business. As RPA gains more maturity we can expect to see RPA not only in transactional or back office environments, but also in middle and front office settings – anywhere there is a large amount of data sets and inefficient processes.  2) Is RPA only about cost reduction?  RPA offers the solution to many of the challenges that organizations and BPOs currently face. However, it's not only about cost reduction, but also about driving predictability, providing higher process quality, speeding up time to c

List item attachments are not available from a task form – even one customized with Nintex Forms. Providing all pertinent information (including related documents) to complete an approval task from a single form, can go a long way toward making the user experience as seamless as possible for approvers. This post walks through meeting this requirement by leveraging a custom action created by Nintex Technical Evangelist, Vadim Tabakman. But, what if you don’t have access to deploy a custom action to your SharePoint environment? The following solution produces a similar outcome, without the need for any custom actions. The WorkflowGet AttachmentsFirst, use the Call web service action to get all attachments from the current item and store the URLs to a multi line of text variable.Next, use the Query XML action to parse through the web service result and get a collection of attachment URLs.Start an HTML TableThe collection of URLs needs to be formatted in a user friendly way for the task fo

The Nintex Product team continues to innovate our Nintex Analytics ­capabilities, and we are excited to share some of the latest enhancements. The needs of our users have always dictated how we prioritize our Nintex Platform roadmap. To gain actionable feedback and direction for this product update, we conducted in-depth research to understand our users’ most pressing pain points using our older analytics tool, Nintex Analytics. In the latest version of Nintex Analytics, we strived to provide better insights into how our customers utilized their Nintex investments. The new dashboard presents data in a more digestible and visual way so you can easily understand how the Nintex Platform is performing in your organization. We focused on building a strong foundation to rapidly expand beyond just workflow, so you can easily integrate other parts of the Nintex Platform. What changes were made to Nintex Analytics?In the latest version of Nintex Analytics, we focused on four main points to impr

We've improved the underlying technology for the Process Edit page to improve performance when editing and saving. The overall functionality is much the same but we've made a few changes: Improved functionalitySystem and Lean tags now show icons to distinguish between them: Improved dialog for selecting an additional group: RACI section now shows the same content as the Procedure page: Removed functionality Map replaced with image - this functionality will be discontinued. Any processes that use this display option will remain unaffected. However the option to change to this display type will be removed. If you use this display type on a process and change to another type, you will not be able to change back. 

Today we will see how we can leverage on simple HTML tags to create a very intuitive log table on Nintex forms.Nintex provides a very easy to view Track History, something like below, with the detailed description of the flow of events and an option to view the changes by clicking on Show completed task.  Many a time you would have come across users who would say “I can’t be clicking at multiple places, can I have a single view of the details. I also want to see the comments on each flow, is it possible out of the box”. They answer is Yes, out of the box using HTML tags.Quite easily you can build a very simple, yet informative table as shown below in every approval page. Here’s how you do it. It’s a quick and easy way. Before approval begins initiate a variable as below. After everywhere approval / outcome modify the variable as below. We can create the table based on the information as needed by the business.  For every approval page just add a label in a group where needed and this v

Hi, Everyone, I wanted to let you know that our latest releases are available now for RPA Central and Bot. Please checkout the Release Notes for what is fixed in these releases, but know that we could not fit the ShadowDOM work in this time around -- that'll come in the next release. Thanks,Mike

IntroductionIn the 15.5 release of Nintex Drawloop DocGen for Salesforce, we introduced new components for DocGen and Salesforce Admins to configure automatic docgen runs using Process Builder (PB) or Flow. In order to use the components for either PB or Flow, you will need to need to have the "Automated DocGen" addon for your subscription.  Creating a Process Builder work to generate documentsA button-click is the most common way Drawloop is used to generate document outputs. This method requires a Salesforce user to login to Salesforce, navigate to a record where a majority of the data is held and select a URL button if you’re using the Classic SFDC interface or through a run component if you’re users are in Lightning. But this process is not the only way Drawloop can generate outputs. Drawloop has always offered its customers the ability to have event-driven outputs through Salesforce workflow rules and apex triggers. This requires a custom field formula field, an outbound message a

IntroductionWith the Nintex Workflow Cloud Release 135 update there is an update to date formats for the document tagger in the document generation action, I wanted create this quick blog post to demonstrate how we can now format a date variable without time without having to format the date to string. How we previously had to format the date to remove the time. Before the Release 135 update to Nintex Workflow Cloud we had no options from within the document tagger in the document generation action to format a date to remove the time from it.   In order to do that we had to use the Format date to string action to format the date to remove the time and save it to a variable that we could use in the document tagger.  How we can now format the date to remove the time.With Release 135 we now have the capability to choose from multiple date formats from within the document tagger.  Thus making the workflow a little more efficient and saving time because we don’t have to format the dates out

Hi everybody,as I did not found out how to add images in comments to community-blog posts, I decided to write an own article. The original post can be found here. The intention to extend the existing solution was to hold the Nintex form small. Imagine how many rich text boxes you need for a larger form with a lot necessary helptexts. And the effort to update them if another person is writing them plus somebody who needs to update the Nintex form if any changes appear.So this a preview of the final version where every dialog-text comes from the externally maintainable list where every text gets loaded and cached on demand without any hidden richtextfield inside the form: To achive this, I created a new list named "Helptexts" where I renamed the displayname of the Title-column to "Key", added a richtext-column named "Helptext" and created the two demo-entries:Then I created a javascript-file, uploaded it to the SiteAssets-library and set a link to it in the Form settings: The configurati

PLEASE NOTE: This advice is for those of you who are using On-Prem SharePoint 2013 prior to release 3.2.4.0. It's way easier in 3.2.4.0 as you have the image URL variable! ~~~ Only recently have I started using the "Document Generation" action instead of "Update Word Document" action.    I didn't realize what I had been missing out on. Suddenly, we can insert tables and images easily, as long as we have our populated variables and templates set-up correctly. And the photos can be auto-resized! AND CAPTIONED! Craziness. This is going to save coworkers a LOT of time! I've taken care of the latter part (the template) for you, and it's attached to this post. The rest of this blog will teach you how to put it into use! Let's focus on the idea of having an inspector out in the field, taking photos, and writing captions using a repeating section, all via Nintex Mobile - maybe on an iPad. I'll walk you through how we bring those pieces together, and if you need more detail on anything, there's

"Stop doing the things you know are wrong, that you could stop doing!" ~ Jordan B. Peterson Are there things that you do (or tolerate) that you know - on some level - are wrong (or just not optimal)? Meaning: Things that are not moving you towards your goal(s), but instead moving you further away? Perhaps in your professional career? Specific processes? In your projects? Your hobbies? Or even your relationships? What might those areas of your life look like - in 1 week/month/year - if you stopped doing those things? It's an important question worth contemplating. At least on an RPA-level, we can provide some guidance on how to to do the right things while minimizing the wrong ones. The following resources will help: Automation: The Way is NOT the Goal! The "Ten Commandments" of Kryon RPA Attended Automation Kryon RPA // UI Automation Method Decision Helper

Hi Nintex Community!As community managers, it is always fantastic to receive feedback from the community and to know where we can improve.We’ve created this quick online survey to collect your feedback and suggestions. Please click here to complete it and thank you for participating!

As some of you might know, we've recently deprecated the Nintex Workflow for Salesforce app, and that took away the ability to embed an NWC form directly into your Salesforce Lightning page layouts. To address this, we put together a new tool that will allow you to embed your forms as before, and submit them with the context (in this case, Record Id), of the record the form was submitted on.  Here's how to use it:First, download the package from gallery.nintex.com, under the "Tools" section.Once you have the zip file, unzip, and you'll discover 2 different files. One is a component, and one is a design file. Next, you'll want to open up the developer console in your Salesforce Organization. Hit "New", and select "Lightning Component". You're going to then get a prompt that asks you to name the component. Give the component a name that you and your teammates will understand, and hit "Submit"It should automatically open a file that has an extension of ".cmp". This is the component piece