Route your commissioning forms through an approval/rejection process
If your commissioning process needs a built-in review/approve/reject workflow, XForms Cx can handle it with ease.
While most Cx projects don’t need a commissioning forms approval process, some do. This certainly applies in the life sciences/pharmaceutical industry. If your firm won a contract to commission a manufacturing plant for Pfizer, GSK, or any other big pharma player, your system will need to be able to prove that the data in it hasn’t been tampered with. And if values have been edited, a clear audit trail of those changes needs to be provided.
XForms Cx now supports the following scenarios which are essential for pharma and CFR Part 11 compliance:
- Full audit trail of changes. Any time a submitted form is edited, a new PDF version is created for it, which can be viewed by clicking on the form history icon.
- Approval workflow. You can assign a particular form type or types to be routed to an individual or group of people for review and approval/rejection.
How approval workflows is implemented in XForms Cx
- Designate one or more form templates to a workflow, which can be single step or multi-step
- Designate one or more people as the “approvers”
- When one of your field techs submits a form as usual, instead of that form being submitted directly to the “Forms” page of the reporting dashboard, it appears in the “Approvals” screen of the reporting dashboard.
- Two-way SMS text messages, emails, and push notifications are used to alert the approver(s) and the field tech (submitter) that there are pending forms waiting for their review.
Here’s what the mobile app screen looks like when a field tech submits a form that goes through an approval workflow. The form is displayed within the Approvals screen of the device instead of the Forms screen of the device. It also will display a little status tag on the top left of the submitted form indicating the status of the submitted form (i.e., Pending, Rejected, or Approved).
On the web reporting dashboard, a little alert notification apears on the top right of the screen, where the bell icon is. Click it to slide open the notifications pane. If you click on the notification itself, you will be taken to the Approvals screen (accessible from the middle of the menu navigation pane on the left of the screen. Here you will see the submitted form waiting for review. Click on the PDF icon to view the submitted form. Then click on the Reviews (edit) icon to the left of the PDF icon to either approve or reject the form.
If you are approving the form, you will then need to sign the approval screen (on the graffiti-style signature block). If you are rejecting the form, you are forced to enter comments. These comments make their way to the mobile app as a comment thread, so that the field tech has some context as to what they did wrong or what the issue(s) are related to the submitted form.
Pending and rejected forms will display large “PENDING” or “REJECTED” watermarks on the forms to distinguish them from approved forms.
Once a form is approved, the approver signature(s), approval date and approval time are appended to the bottom of the PDF form and form part of the form metadata. Like the screenshot below.
The intent of the approvals/signature workflow within Cx is to be simple. It’s not complicated to set up, and it’s an optional thing at the form template level. This means that you can use this approvals w0rkflow for one form template type, several templates, or all of them.