Overview

Operations of an organization is a collection of departments or a department that makes processes available to customers and employees to propel the organization forword. Operations serves as the pipeline for activities or processes and how they are done in an organization which may include HR and culture, Finance, Management and other departments. With this in mind you might wonder why i am building Flobaze. In this writeup, i will try as much as possible to outline why i think this tool should exist.

The tradition

In almost all organizations, in order to administer services to employees or customers, processes are put in place to control the flow of information and visibility to authorities. To interface with these processes, there is always a form structured in a way to help guide members to provide the right information mostly using a google form or a form printed on paper. These forms can range from petty cash requests, purchase orders, leave forms, attendance and others.

The structure of theses forms can vary from organization to organization making it seem impossible to fit in a rigid structure and when you decide to tackle only one department, it becomes apparent that organizations do not thrive on only one department.

So then why build Flobaze?

A little back story. Back in 2020 when the pandemic struck, we at Built had to work from home completely and during that time processes like petty cash request for example could not fit into the remote culture. I have watched our accounts payable officer try to find tools that could fit in the process and there was no tool that seem to handle that perfectly.
With this experience and my history in B2B software, a dynamic and highly customizable SAS platform can be a good way to streamline these processes. In the next chapter i will outline how that can be done but feel free to go through the roadmap to MVP

How would flobaze solve this and how well?

Operations of an organization is quite a broad concept and thinking of it in a rigid way may not cover all scenarios. To make sure all kind of processes can fit in such a system, it has to be broken into components that give users the flexibility to fit their organizational structure into the system. The major components are listened below.

A flexible form builder: The idea of moving a traditional process to a digital system should not require a change in structure.
The first and major component of this system is a highly flexible and powerful form builder that would help organizations replicate any existing forms. What this means is, you can move into the system, build your own forms and not forced to change your process structure.

Control management: The whole idea of operations is to make sure people can oversee processes and control the flow of information.
Control flows are added steps to the forms that determine who can have access to a form and when submitted who can review or approve a form or request. for example, when you submit the petty cash request form the accounts payable officer should be the one to see it and when you submit the leave form the HR is the one that is going to see, review and approve it.

Team onboarding: Obviously, only one person cannot make this work on the platform. This component makes it possible to invite all members of the organization to join the organization on Flobaze in their respective departments, find the forms that were built using the form builder and use them when needed.

Activity center: To boost productivity, it is important to know what you need to know at the right time in order not to miss out.
It is important to have an overview of all activities that concern you on the platform, get notified via email and have a well structured narration of all activities that concern you. For example when your leave request is approved you should know instantly.

Conclusion

This is still an idea and a roadmap to MVP. There might be more additions and changes when it gets into the hands of users but this is the main idea.