Automatically email completed inspection reports

This is something a few of our sites have done with integrations for specific templates.  In some cases, they send the full PDF report, some a link, and others just specific question responses in the body of the email.  My concern is that we will start overloading email systems with PDF files that can be accessed directly in the platform, and we will take advantage of it so much that the emails go ignored.

By baking the feature in directly, it would avoid building a lot of custom one-off integrations or lookup tables (which templates to send reports for and to whom).  Perhaps there could be options to send the PDF or a link to the inspection and to pull details from the title page into the subject and/or body.

Hey @corey, I hope you’ve been well!

Great to hear that your organization have integration set up already to streamline the process.

If you have time, I would love to a few questions:

1. Did you face any challenges when initially setting up the integration? When I joined SafetyCulture as a Support Analyst, learning to set up integration was probably the hardest part. 
2. If you had an option to automate this process on the SafetyCulture web app, would you still rely on existing integrations?

I agree with your concern regarding sending too many email notifications. Something we will need to look into.

1. The sites that did this have some more technically inclined people or had someone that did it at another site help them.  Aside from a few more involved things like doing calculations in a spreadsheet and sending those values, I think the platform they used made it relatively easy.
2. If we had an option built into the SC web app, it would of course open up the possibility to the masses without a separate integration platform. More people would use it, although that’s where my fear of it getting out of control comes into play. We could eliminate those integrations that were simpler and the built-in option could handle, but anything more complex would still require the existing separate integrations.

We do this by using the API.

We collect the completed reports, extract the contact details and then use “MS Power Automate” to automatically send the pdf of the report via an email attachment.

We also then store PDF within our SharePoint repository renamed to comply with our company document naming conventions .

I do this with Power Automate, Power Automate: Email inspection reports with Outlook | iAuditor (safetyculture.com).

Including PDF and specific responses from the inspection, the later following: Power Automate: Expressions with SafetyCulture inspection data | iAuditor.

We use this feature with templates that we consider to be of high importance, where the correct information needs to be submitted as soon as possible.

When this was set up, I had complications with duplication of emails. Due to the importance of the information, the flow was configured for both complete and incomplete inspections.

Users came back to edit the inspection, and each time they did we received another email. It was decided with the users that they would have 24h to edit the inspection, the flow was then changed from repeating every 1 hour to every 24 hours.

This kind of solved the issue. In the last 4 months we had received 6 duplicates, and most of these were caused by user clicking to "edit" inspection but not doing any actual changes.

Hi @Corey, 

Thanks for sharing! It's great to hear that some sites have been successful with setting up integrations, and I can understand why you might worry about things getting out of control or add more complexity to the current workflow as well.

This potential feature would definitely need some thinking to balance the benefits of not interrupting any current integrations workflow and giving customers a choice/simple configuration to automatically send completed inspection reports without needing to set up any integrations.

Awesome feedback and thanks always for sharing your insights!

Hey @Elmleigh, 

Great setup with Power Automate and Sharepoint!!! Did you have any prior experience and knowledge on setting up integrations in the past? Also, if you had an option to automatically email completed inspection reports via the SafetyCulture web and mobile app, would you continue to use the integration you’ve set up??

Our team is trying to help our customers and understand on “How we can simplify and automate sharing inspection reports with key stakeholders without needing to rely on integrations”.

Hey @Annagiusti8!

We hope our support articles were helpful when setting up your Power Automate integration and love how you updated the flow to avoid any duplication email being sent.

This is a great call out as completing an inspection, editing an inspection, and completing it again can definitely cause headache if we’re automatically sending emails after a completion. Flooding users’ email inbox.

What are your thoughts on having an option to automatically email completed inspection reports via the SafetyCulture web and mobile app without needing to set up integrations? 

We use Power Automate to integrate various platforms that we use. Of course we would have used an inbuilt option if it was there, but every company will have a slightly different requirement. Our main objective was to rename the report file to comply with our procedures and store within our SharePoint structure.

We run as two separate flows…

1. Search every hour for modified inspections. Extract report. Create variables from parts of the inspection title. Send an email with a renamed subject and attachment to our central email repository.
2. When a new email arrives in our central email repository we create variables from the subject line. Check to see if the the required folder within our SharePoint structure exists. Create if required. Save attachment in specified folder. Email contacts that we have in a corresponding SharePoint list for a particular job. (Project Manger, Customers etc)

(The API can be a little confusing in finding the Token, SiteID, TemplateID etc)

Hi @Hojae Jung
Yes, I find the support articles very helpful!

I really like the idea of the automatic email after completion, I do have a slightly different idea based on my organisation needs.
 

• We should have the option when setting/editing the template to add email notification and edit body and receivers. 
• when conducting the inspection, we should have a button at the end of it that will send the email notification. We give the user the option to decide when they need to send the email
• again when conduction the inspection, if this were to be saved as in progress we should have a reminder.

With these I am trying to cover the following events:

• an user that came back to add more information to the template. Having the email button will make them aware that they need to have all information before hitting sent.
• an user that mark as in progress not knowing about the email button. This is were the reminder plays the role (just as we do with the flagged items and their actions)
• an user clicked to “Edit” the inspection but didn’t actually “Edit”. We avoid here the current issue I am facing, duplication of the email.

Setting up the integration isn't difficult now that I know how to do it, but that wasn't the case a couple of years ago. We should have a simplified way to send email reports that doesn't involve a big process so everybody can do it.

It is also a good opportunity to mention the challenges that integration presents so that Safety Culture can not only have a new feature but also an improved feature of the existing one.

PS: I haven't thought deeply about the possible disadvantages of the features I mentioned (probably a few)

My client finds it most useful to have a full week of activity in a single report every Monday morning. They like “one-stop-shopping” to know how their drivers are doing.  So far, this is only possible through a custom process to pull the data via Exporter, and then run the custom process to build the reports. This is especially true when the client uses fleet management or other products as part of their safety program and need the “driver events” from those systems integrated into the reports. 

It requires some a bit of time to think and build it, but in the end, the leadership can see quickly what is working well and if anything needs some attention in 1-2 sheets.

Hello!

Is this still a topic that SafetyCulture customers are interested in?

We (Lander Systems) are a SafetyCulture Integrations Partner, and we’re in the early stages of investigating building a new plug-and-play ‘partner integration’ that would unlock more options when sending inspection reports.

To set it up, you would connect our app to your SafetyCulture account via the integrations section, and then follow a basic workflow to configure some ‘sending rules’.

We are exploring supporting:

1. Automatically email a report when the inspection is completed.
2. Automatically save a report somewhere when the inspection is completed.
3. Based on parameters in the inspection (Title, Site, GRS) send or save to different destinations/recipients.
4. Choose which report template to use, or use a custom one.
5. Choose which file format to use, or send a link.
6. Customise the email content when sending by email.
7. Choose the schedule for the send.

Our goal would be to make a straightforward, bespoke add-on to extend the powers of the SafetyCulture app, as an alternative to the ‘do it all yourself’ approach of an app like Power Automate, Workato, or Zapier.

Is there anyone who would be interested in jumping on a short research call with me to provide more details on their use-cases — so we can make sure we build something really useful for you? Happy to chat to any Customer Success team members who have ideas too. :)