Procedures

What is a procedure?

Procedures are ways to record work instructions, data collection, and workflow in ION. Procedures are made up of steps and their child steps that define what work is to be done and what data is to be collected. The execution of work is not done from this part of ION - it is done in a Run.

Users must have the permissions CreateProcedure and UpdateProcedure create and release a procedure.

Creating a procedure

To create a procedure, go to the Procedures section in ION. You will see a list of procedures created at your company. Click New procedure to create a new procedure.

Enter the title and description of your new procedure. Don't worry, you can change these while your procedure is still in draft.

Select a procedure type. Build, Maintenance, Test, and Inspection Procedures have the same functionality, with one exception -- an inspection procedure can be used in an inspection run, which would be automatically created at the time of receipt of Purchase Order while using the workflow here.

Updating a procedure

Only procedures that are in draft can be updated. Once a procedure has been released, that version can no longer be modified. To modify a procedure, go to the Procedures section and select a procedure to modify. Now, you can modify the procedure's steps, attachments, and data collection fields.

Steps

Procedures can have multiple steps. Each step has its own content, attachments, and fields. During a run, each step will be presented in the Technicians view in sequence.

Versions and Archiving

Procedures are version-controlled, and runs use specific versions of procedures, so that the exact procedure that was used in production is always traceable. There can only be one version of a procedure in draft for a given procedure. From a released or archived procedure, you can "Create new draft", which will create the next incremental procedure version in draft.

You can archive a procedure using the status icon in the top right. Archiving is useful for making sure a procedure does not get utilized in all runs going forward. We recommend this only when you are sure a procedure will never be needed again. When a procedure is archived, it will be removed from the procedure screen and from the run creation screen as an option. Archived procedures can be viewed by clicking show all versions from the procedures home page.

All versions that stem from a procedure will be part of the same Procedure Family.

Reviews

When you are done updating a new version of a procedure, you can submit it for review. In the procedure action selector, select "For review". From there, you can add the roles and approvers who should review the procedure.

Approvers will see the pending review requests in their home dashboard. Clicking into the review request will take the reviewer to the procedure to leave a review. Once all reviewers have approved the procedure, it will be automatically set to "released" so that it can be used in production runs.

You can configure required approval roles in Organization settings. Navigate to Settings > Procedures > Reviewer Roles. You can configure which roles and how many approvals from each of the roles is required to for the procedure to be released.

This configuration requires 2 Engineers to approve the Procedure for it to get released. Required Roles appear in the "Required approvers" section in the Reviews tab of Procedures.