Coronavirus (Covid-19) has had a huge impact on the way we live our daily lives. One of the biggest impacts is in the business world with many companies shutting down during this pandemic in order to eliminate the risk of transmission of the virus within the workplace. This was only a short-term solution. In order to get back to work, businesses are working to follow recommendations by the CDC and OSHA to decrease the chances that an infected person may transmit the virus in the workplace. Many businesses have had to update their processes in order to make changes to follow the recommended guidelines.
We recently had the opportunity to help a client put hundreds of people back to work during the pandemic with a creative solution using Pipelines and Quickbase. This process also allowed them to eliminate the need for check-in stations at the entrances to buildings offering time saving benefits as well.
With the addition of a Health Survey table to an Employee Database, we were able to setup an email notification that would target an employee’s cellphone number as an email to SMS. This requires the employee’s cell phone number and carrier. (See how to determine carriers using Quickbase and Twilio here) A Pipeline searches for employees that are scheduled for that day, and it updates the record with a timestamp for any employee it finds. This edit record operation triggers the email notification to the employee’s cell phone.
A text goes out to employees every morning, and management is alerted if employees have symptoms keeping them from their shift. This allows employees to go back to work and ability for management to track health in a proactive manner. MCFTech is working to improve this system to track compliance and have demoed an instance that uses an employee scheduling system, tracking health surveys to individual shifts.
Client Requirements:
- Resources table
- Cell phone
- Carrier
- SMS Email formula field changing the cell phone number to the carrier’s appropriate SMS address (ex: @vzwpix.com)
- Notification Trigger (We used a Date/Time field)
- Notification to the SMS Email Formula field with a link to ADD a Health Survey Record in the body (We add the related Resource RID in the add link)
- Health Survey table
- Simple questions to determine the status of someone’s health related to the Resource table
- Optional Notification to management if symptoms are reported.
- Pipeline
- A pipeline that runs on a schedule to set the notification to the current Date/Time for each Resource record found based on filters for scheduling. (We used a Monday – Sunday Multi Select field to determine if the Resource was scheduled)
As a Quickbase Gold Partner, MCFTech is able to leverage the speed and agility of Quickbase and our deep technical competency to create robust, cost effective solutions that take days versus years to implement. For more information on how MCFTech can assist you with getting back to work, discuss similar solutions or additional business needs, contact us.