CONTACT Software has fundamentally optimized an essential IT tool in the day-to-day work of many companies. The new version of the Workflow Designer is significantly faster and easier to use in the web browser than before.
The CONTACT Elements platform offers an ISO 26262-certified workflow management tailored to collaborative processes in development and manufacturing. With the Workflow Designer, users can visually map sequential or parallel operations, easily involve responsible persons, and provide them with all necessary documents and contextual information. This allows them to quickly initiate tasks such as technical changes, approval or authorization procedures across departments, transparently track their status and results, and document each step in the central database in an audit-proof manner.
The next CONTACT Elements release will be launched in September. As part of further developing the technology platform and its specialist applications, the Workflow Designer has undergone a comprehensive redesign. “Its new version now matches the look and feel of our other web applications,” says Christian Sorgatz, Principal Software Engineer and one of the project members.
Modelling processes faster
CONTACT's team has retained the basic structure of the application: the workflow structure including tasks is displayed as a graph on the left, while the detail area with additional information is shown on the right – both featuring noticeable improvements in terms of usability. In addition, the increased performance of the new Workflow Designer has a positive overall impact on the user experience.
The graph offers new assistance functions, including the minimap (top left) for quick orientation and navigation or a continuous zoom function. It now displays the constraints directly before each task to make their effects visible immediately.
In addition, process managers can now create tasks simply by clicking a plus button at the appropriate place. The familiar Workflow Designer selection box remains as a supplement. CONTACT has also revamped the cards representing tasks. Their color-coded information indicating the current task status now offers higher contrast and includes various icons, which help visualize the status for persons with red-green color deficiency.
Simplified use
The improved detail area is consistent with CONTACT’s other web applications by now providing all workflow data in dedicated tabs. This makes the position of specific content clearer and the user interface more organized. Process managers find all interaction options for assigning constraints and other operations on the task cards in this area. They can also use the context menu as an alternative to select one or more tasks and assign responsibility for them to a role or person.
Other improvements include the fact that the CONTACT Elements platform now fully supports all administrative functions in the Web UI and system tasks can be integrated directly into dialogs such as “Change” via its Universal Classification. The functionally and technically optimized Workflow Designer will be presented in detail at CONTACT Open World 2024 in November. Customers can use the new version earlier, as the next Elements release will be published in September.
