How to Accelerate Your Workflow with Email and File Management

How to Accelerate Your Workflow with Email and File Management 

 

Quickbase Pipelines provides an intuitive way to automate your workflows between solutions, such as Slack, Gmail, Hubspot, Marketo, Salesforce, OneDrive and more.  

Pipelines enables you to quickly connect data, integrate your systems, and orchestrate automated workflows using simple business logic, all within one unified platform. The flexibility allows organizations to modernize processes and keep up with fast-changing market conditions. 

In part one of the Quickbase Pipelines webinar series we used the order to cash cycle as an example and focused on the optimization of the initial sales process. Today, we will continue to utilize the same model and because this is a large, intricate process, we’ll focus our examples on using Pipelines to solve for three key problems: manual data re-entry, inaccessible order documents/forms, and scheduling delays.  

The demonstrations will include: 

• Automatically generating orders 
• Notifying the Quality Control team on upcoming orders  
• Automatically scheduling QC inspections  
• Ensuring that key documents are accessible to the appropriate teams 

Before we start the tutorial, you will first want to access Pipelines and connect to the Box Channel. For step by step information on connecting to Box, click here. 

Now that you have connected to the Box Channel, we can start creating our Pipeline! 
 

Fulfillment App 

• This app can be downloaded through Quickbase  
• The top left-hand corner of the app has three different tables: orders, tasks, documents.  

• This app will be used in conjunction with creating different Pipelines throughout the demonstrations.  

  

Demonstration 1 – Automatically Populate New Orders  

Step A: Create your Trigger  

1. Click “Create Pipeline” on homepage.  

1. Locate Box under Channels > files > File Uploaded  

1. Drag out the File Uploaded trigger  

1. Add condition: Parent > equals > copy paste the correct Parent ID (can be found in the URL when in the folder in Box ( https://app.box.com/folder/parentidhere ) 

 

 Parent > equals > copy paste the correct parent ID  

 

Step B: Search your Quickbase Table and Create the Importing Step  

1. Locate Quickbase under channels > Bulk record sets > drag import with CSV  

1. Select a correct name for “Table” to ensure your file is getting imported to the right location.  

1. To obtain “CSV URL” click the box menu from Step A and drag out “File Transfer URL” in the given space.  

1. Fill in the “First Row is List field of Names” as yes/no given your criteria's.  

1. Define your header rows. In this example they will match the column headers of the spreadsheet in Box. Ex.  

Opp #, Close Date, Company, Amount, Product Name, Product Type, Opportunity Owner 
NOTE: These will correspond to fields in Quickbase in later steps. 

1. Map each of your fields and pick each column from the drop-down menu.  

 

Import with CSV  

 Map out each field individually  

 

Trigger your pipeline!  

1. Turn on sync on the top right page  

1. Upload file in box. Locate the Box channel > Files > Upload File In 

1. Go back to the fulfillment order app and all upcoming orders will be listed. 

 

 

 

Pipeline is created  

Demonstration 2 - Notifying QC and Scheduling Inspections 

1st Pipeline  

Step A(trigger): Record Created. 

1. Head over to your Pipelines homepage and start with “Create a Pipeline” 

1. Drag over the Record Created trigger step from the Quickbase channel  

1. Select the table the table to be triggered, in this case it is our Orders table. 

1. Specify fields you may need for subsequent steps. 

1. Insert a condition for the type of order, this will determine the type of task to be created. 

1. In this scenario I set a condition where the Product type is equal to Consulting. 

Step B (Create Consulting task) 

1. Below the condition, under the “Then” portion of the condition, drag the Create record action on the left-hand space. From here you can map any fields appropriate for this type of task. 

Step C:(Create Hardware/Software Task) 

1. Below the condition drag the Create Record action below the “Else” portion. From here you can map fields accordingly for this type of task. 

Step D: Create a Folder In (Box) 

1. Outside of the condition completely, drag the “Create a folder In” over. 

1. Make sure you set the correct folder path, by default it will be “All Files/” 

1. In the name field use whatever unique naming convention you would like. In my example I used the Record ID# as the name of my folder. Since Record ID# is numeric I also added additional jinja to make sure Box interprets the value as a whole number. 

e.g. {{a.id | int}} 
NOTE: This step will be used in our final Pipeline for uploading attachments. 

2nd Pipeline: 

Step A: Record Created (Task) 

1. Drag out “Record created” from the side menu. 

1. Select the Tasks table from the Table dropdown. 

1. Specify any fields we may need for subsequent steps (anything we will want emailed out or populated in our calendar invite). 

 

Step B: Send an Email (Outlook) 

1. Select the “To Address”, you can either hard code a recipient or utilize an email field from the task that was created to send to the correct individual. 

1. Create your subject. In my case I added my own title with the ID of the Order. 

1. e.g  You Have a new Task Assigned for Order #{{a.id}} 

1. Set the contents of the body of the email. In my case I also utilized HTML to include line breaks(<br>). 
    
   Order #: {{a.order}} 
   Task Name: {{a.task_name}}<br> 
   Start: {{a.start_date_time}}<br> 
   Customer: {{a.order_company}}<br> 
   Product: {{a.order_product_name}}<br> 
   Product Type: {{a.order_product_type}}<br> 
   Duration (Hours): {{a.duration_hours}} 
    

Step C: Create a Calendar Event 

1. Drag the Create Calendar Event action below the Send email from Step B. 

1. Set your subject like in Step B 

1. Set your body like in Step B 

1. Drag over the corresponding start date and end date fields for the meetings duration. 

 

 

Demonstration 3: Key Documents are Accessible to appropriate Teams  

Step A:  Record Created (Documents table) 

1. Drag over the record created step. 

1. Select the Documents table from the dropdown. 

1. Specify fields for subsequent steps. In my case “File, Order#, Related Order and Type” 

1. Insert a condition. Where Type is equal to “Contract”. 

Step B: Create Contract Record in our Legal Application. 
Context: When a Contract document is added to our fulfillment app, we want to create a contract record and upload this file to our Contract manager application so Legal can review. 

1. Under the “Then” portion of our condition, drag the create record action over. 

1. Specify field you want to populate; in my case I only want the Order #. 

Step C: Upload a File 

1. Directly below Step B, drag the Upload a File step (under the attachments section of the Quickbase Channel) 

1. Make sure where it says “Record” that it is linked to the Record Created in Step B. 

1. Expand the window on the right so you can see fields from Step A. 

1. Drag the “File Transfer URL” from Step A to the URL field on Step C. 

1. Where it says “Field” select the file attachment field from the Contracts app you want to upload the file to. 

1. Finally Name the file, in my case I dragged the original file name from Step A. 

Step D: Lookup a Folder 

1. Completely outside of our condition, drag the “Lookup a Folder” action over. 

1. For the query select “Name equals” and drag the Order# from Step A. 
   NOTE: This needs to match the value of the folder you created in our second pipeline. 

Step E: Upload a File 

1. Directly below the Lookup a Folder step, drag the “Upload a file” action for Box. 

1. Make sure the Folder is linked to the Folder we looked up in Step D. 

1. Drag the File Name over to Name. 

1. Drag the file transfer URL over to the URL. 

When you're ready, feel free to test the pipeline by clicking, "Run Pipeline". Go to Box and you will see your file uploaded! 

In addition, the entire step by step process for all the 3 demonstrations can be seen directly in the webinar.  

Watch It Now Here