Introducing Blueprints

Hello App Creators,

Greetings from Zoho Creator!

We're happy to inform you about a new feature called Blueprint—Zoho Creator's process management tool. This feature enables you to customize every detail of every process you design in your Creator application. The blueprint builder has a drag and drop interface which makes setting up blueprints extremely easy.

What is a blueprint

Zoho Creator's Blueprint is an online replica of a business process. Blueprint makes processes more efficient by facilitating automation, validation, and collaboration among various stakeholders in the process. With Blueprint, you can ensure that your business processes are well-defined, streamlined, and free of errors.

A blueprint in Zoho Creator resembles a flowchart. The blueprint has two key components:

Stages - These are the different milestones in the process.
Transition - These act as a link between the two stages, and the conditions required for moving between one state to another is defined here.

Illustration

Let's take a look at Zylker, an ecommerce platform that delivers products to customers from sellers. Coordination between various stakeholders is required for the delivery to be completed smoothly, and the delivery process involves a lot of steps to ensure the product gets from the warehouse to the customer successfully.

Once the order is placed, the information is sent to the warehouse team. This team packs the product and then transfers to the delivery team, which brings it to the customer's address. Zylker also accepts returns from customers, but the products have to satisfy certain criteria. The returned product will be accepted only after a visual check, technical check, and approval by the seller. Some of the processes are done manually and they need to be automated to ensure faster deliveries.

In the above delivery process, Zylker faces a few challenges:

There are many stakeholders, like the processing team, delivery team, and warehouse team, who handle the order processing, and it's difficult to keep them working in unison.
The different stages of the process, like placing, packing and delivering orders, requires different sets of actions. For example, canceling a delivery won't be available once the order is delivered, and the return and review buttons are visible only after delivery.
Manual processes, like checking the product before it's returned, can be left untracked.

So a blueprint for Zylker would need:

The different steps in the delivery process, documented as stages.
The various actions done while moving from one stage to another are represented as transitions. For example, the Cancel button won't be displayed after delivery, and the Return and Review buttons will be visible only after delivery.
The stakeholders are the teams involved in the delivery process, like the warehouse and delivery teams. They need to only be given access to perform certain actions. This can be configured under the Transition owners section.
Returns can be accepted only after fulfillment of the three-step process. This can be configured with a parallel transition with the required criteria.

Creating a blueprint

Navigate to Blueprint under Workflows.
Click on New blueprint.
Choose the form for which the blueprint should be created.
Enter a name for the blueprint.
Configure the condition for the blueprint to be triggered.
Click Create blueprint.
Now, the blueprint page will appear.
You can drag and drop the required stages.
Create a transition between the stages by dragging a connector between them.
Configure the transition.
Click Save.

Documentation

We have provided comprehensive help documents for Blueprint. Please read the following help docs before creating the blueprint.

Understand blueprint

Create blueprint

Feature release plan

Blueprint will be available for users from June 2021.

If you have any questions related to blueprint, please feel free to contact us at support@zohocreator.com.

Best,

The Zoho Creator Team

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