With Automations, you can enforce certain actions to take place automatically after a desired event has occurred. This is activated by constructing a set of conditions that orchestrates the whole automation to work with accuracy and efficiency every time the event is triggered, thereby relieving your team of any manual intervention. Such a set of events, conditions and resulting actions are referred to as automation rules in Loc8.

See the example below to understand when will you need an automation rule:

A job of type Work Order has been created for a top customer (say Gilbert Enterprises), and that job is assigned to an expert team member (say Cody Heatherington). It would be very efficient for a process to automatically change the priority of such jobs to the highest priority i.e. Urgent, and in addition notify the assigned team member and one of the customer contacts about the creation of the new work order.

The scenario when configured as an automation rule in Loc8 is shown below:

1 Name of the new automation rule
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​2 The main event that will trigger the desired actions based on certain conditions
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​3 The set of conditions, all of which must be true for the desired actions to take place
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​4 The set of conditions, where if any of them is true will participate with other conditions and the main event to successfully set off the
desired action
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​5 The desired actions that will take place as a result of the automation. The actions may change or update attributes, and notify people from your organisation or the customer, via their email and in-app notifications.

In this article, we will see how to:

STEP 1 Go to the Settings page to access the Automation rules area.

STEP 2 In the RULES page, you will find the option to create a new rule entirely from scratch or enable one of the ready-to-use rules that may only need minimum edits to suit your business requirement.

Loc8 provides a collection of automation rules for Jobs and Quotes to help you get started.
Select the automation rule that best suits your current scenario. You may use the automation rule as is or update it by adding new conditions and actions to closely match your requirement. You may also remove the suggested action and add a more appropriate action, this includes referencing your own choice of message template if the automation rule aims at notifying the contact people.

STEP 1 Browse through the collection and open the rule that matches your requirement.

STEP 2 Add new conditions or actions if required.

INFO: The ready-to-use automation rules are Enabled by default. So if you no longer need the automation rule you will Disable it as shown below:

STEP 1 Under the selected category, create a new rule using the +Add rule button.

STEP 2 Configure the events, conditions and actions of the new automation rule by selecting the suggested attributes from the dropdown and suggestion fields.

Based on the event, specify the conditions that will act in combination to trigger the expected actions.

And, finally define the actions that must be performed when the event occurs and the conditions are true:

For actions that involve notifying an associated contact person, a notification will be sent out in the selected correspondence media such as their email, SMS or both email and SMS.

The structure of the notification is based on the message template that you specify in the automation rule. This message template can be either chosen from a collection of ready-to-use message template or a custom message template created by you.

In either cases, you must know the name of the message template so that you can reference it in the automation rule. 

STEP 1 You may check the message template before you add it in the automation rule just so that you know the structure of the message is what you wish to send out as a notification.

To jump to the message templates area, just right-click on Message Templates and open in a new browser window.

STEP 2 Look up the message templates under the list of standard entities such that the selected entity matches the entity (either logically or by type) for which the automation rule is being created.

Open the message template and review the content:

If you wish to update the content and insert new message variable, please see the list of variables you can use per entity in the article Variables Used in Message Templates.

You may also choose to create a new message template instead. Just follow the steps in the article Create Message Templates.

By default, a new automation rule is Disabled. Make sure to Enable it for the automation rule to activate. Once you manually enable the rule, save the changes.

The automation rule is ready.

Next up, learn how to turn on the standard notifications for your workforce and customers in the Configure Standard Notifications.