Save and wait for pipeline

I would like an easier way to track department meeting attendance. I have a table for Departments, Staff, and a child table in common called Members which associates many staff with many departments and includes the start & end date of their involvement with the department. I also have a table called Meetings which is child to Departments and a table called Attendees which is child to both Meetings and Members. Each time I create a Meeting record, I select a Department and then add a large number of Attendees (selection restricted to only active Members of the selected Department).

Adding attendees this way is time-consuming, so I created a Pipeline which runs when a Meeting record is saved. It queries all active Members of a Department and creates Attendees for each found as children of the Meeting. However, this Pipeline often takes 15-30 seconds to execute. While I have access to the Pipelines page, my fellow users don't and it's not obvious to them that a Pipeline is running when they save a meeting. 

So I created a formula rich-text button which uses the SaveBeforeNavigating class to bring users to a codepage after saving a Meeting. It shows a loading animation, informative message, and redirects the users to the Meeting form after a few seconds. However, sometimes the Pipeline isn't totally finished by then, or maybe it fails. In this case the user is confused. 

How can I get Pipelines to communicate the status of its activity to a codepage so that I can accurately update the user if/when it finishes execution? If this is not possible, any ideas for a workaround?

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John Erdmann
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