[Music] hello this is John Hill a grant with Glide fast consulting and today I wanted to provide you with an introduction to ServiceNow flow designer what is flow designer a flow designer is a now platform feature for automating processes in a single design environment it lets process owners use natural language to automate approvals tasks notifications and record operations without coding you can expand flow designer to communicate with external instances and third-party systems by requesting a separate subscription to integration hub which is used to automate integration tasks or develop custom integrations if this sounds familiar it's because it's a lot like the workflow editor this is kind of going to be the replacement possibly in the future they've they've kind of geared they've tried to push towards the flow designer instead of using the workflow editor especially for no code or local admins that don't know a lot about scripting the flow designer is included with the platform license but integration hub if you use that it will require an additional subscription package there are several benefits to using flow designer and here are several that are outlined here these are all taken from the ServiceNow documentation so you'll find this all in the documentation and this is just more of a high-level I'm showing you kind of the are the high-level positives of using the flow designer so it consolidates multiple automation capabilities in a single environment so process owners and developers can build business processes from a single interface it consolidates configuration and runtime information in a single environment as well so they can troubleshoot flows from a single interface it provides natural language descriptions of floral flow logic to help non-technical users understand flow elements so if you have if you don't have tentacle users that know how to use to script very well you can build flows with like they call them data pills and data pills are essentially variables so you can you can actually drill down into the fields and dot walk and grab the variables that you need and those are actually called data pills you drag and drop them into the things are the flow and I will show you that towards the end of this this deck it promotes process automation by enabling subject matter experts to develop and share reusable actions with flow designers so you can actually anything you bill save can be reused especially if you build sub flows and whatnot they can be reused in other flows it reduces upgrade cost with upgrade safe now platform logic replacing complex custom script it reduces development cost by providing a library of reusable actions and it enables extending flow designer content by subscribing to ServiceNow integration helper installing spokes now the floor designer has three main components now there's a lot of other components below that like there's different kinds of actions and things like that but the three main components that make it up are flows sub flows and actions so a flow think of it like kind of the main it's like the work flow if you're used to the work flow editor and building them out fork add items or different tables think of a flow as kind of the overall workflow it's an automated process a process of consisting of a sequence of actions and a trigger so a trigger is when should it fire flows automate business logic for a particular application process now sub flow of sub flow think of it like a an additional like if you if you're used to workflows it's like the sub workflow that runs in conjunction to the main workflow that that kind of takes over for a specific process and then it goes back to the parent workflow so it's an automated process consisting of a sequence of reusable actions and specific data inputs that allow the process to be started from a flow sub flow or script sub flows automate generic business logic that can be applied to multiple applications or processes now finally there's their actions what what what needs to be done when these flows run and when the conditions are met so now platform features it it's you don't have to write code it's if someone submits an inquiry via an incident for instance you can use an update record action to assign it to a specific group and you can use data pills and do it you know it's it's completely easy to do and you don't you don't need any complex scripts or anything like that to do the work so I will show you that here there is a couple examples I have towards the end here of this deck and I will show you this in the tool as well I have these actually set up in my personal developer instance so we have an instance so everything is top-down as you'll see but this is one that I created called update incident inquiry so what's the trigger the trigger is when an incident is created okay so what you do when you first create this is you go okay what's the trigger it's created so what's created an incident record so you choose the table incident what's the condition you don't want them to fire on all of the instance right so you choose a specific condition in this case that booked category is inquiry or help and basically what I have the action I choose an action to update the incident record there are several actions you can take as you'll notice some of those some of these actions will require additional plugins they won't all show up there's additional plugins that are available that you can install that will allow additional actions to be available to you in this case I've got update record and what that essentially does is it just based on the conditions here it updates the record with the following information so it's pointed to the instant table the fields assignment group is customer service customer support and impact is three as three or low so in this case you know a lot of companies may go well if someone's submitting an incident and inquiry or help incident and they say well the the impact is high we don't really think that's true we're gonna we're going to default it to low this is just an example it may never happen but this is just something you can very simple flow that you can utilize to update a couple of fields on an incident record so this will automatically assign to customer support and the impact will change as soon as they submit this incident now the next one I have is a little bit more complex this is a training request approval though I created a training table kind of an application in my personal developer instance and what this essentially is is any time a training request is created it updates the training request so basically so we update the record to state awaiting approval okay so that's right here little area here assignment group customer support it asked for approval and then it if the request is approved it updates the training request record else it updates it again with like it goes to close complete and I will get to into it here because I'm going to show you this in the tool and finally provided here are some resources now all of the the benefits that I've provided the what you know the definition of it this is all in the ServiceNow documentation which you'll find here it's pretty detailed there's also I've provided the the flow designer release notes this came out in the Kingston release so you provided the release no stick so you can look back on this and kind of get an idea of how how it you know when it came out history of flow designer etc and this I believe is to the main page and there are some good good there's some good information on that page as well here are some training resources this takes you to developers service developer data service now calm it's pretty extensive the flow designer training takes you through a lot and there this one is regarding decisions which is pretty cool that's that kind of goes deep into the different things you can do with flow designer and this one here is another developer one that I'm thinking I'm trying to think what this one is exactly developing for flow designer objectives okay this is an additional one for on top of the regular flow designer so there's several different there's several different training pieces you can use different training so finally let me go into my personal instance and show you what I have here so if you click if you just type in flow here you'll see several different options and what you want to do here in the case that you know for creating flows and whatnot you click on the designer link anyway I'll do is it'll open another window kind of similar to like studio would if you're working on applications and you're presented with several different flows here you can actually click up here between flows sub flows actions etc now I want to I want to use flows because I'm looking for a specific one so we have update instant enquiry here and as you can see this is the flow this group this little green button here means that is activated so you see this button over here called deactivate that's a good indication it is activated this is the other indication here this would be gray if it was not activated so it's kind of like a workflow where you can publish it and you can check it out but you can tell at a glance if it's actually activated so what are we doing here we're saying the trigger if an incident record is created in category is inquiry or help so what what we do here is we update the record if that meets the condition and what I did here is I actually just I chose the action sea-salt see all these separate because individual actions ServiceNow core you'll find a lot of the main actions that you typically use I mean I found myself using this most of the time so it's update records create record create tasks delete records etc etc you have quite a few and you have all of these other ones and these like I said these will not all show up for you unless you have installed the appropriate plugins okay so ServiceNow core and we chose update record which is right here you just click on that and then what do we do the incident record that's usually pre-populated because we've chosen to up here we use the Simon group this customer support an impact is lower but you can actually see these triggers over here and then this is the incident record itself we will notice is you can actually drill down into here so you can drag these pills to where you want them and I'll show you that in a second but in this case let's check this out a new all right test and let's change the impact to hi and submit it we'll just save it here so we can see what happens to the fields and you get a give it a second and then will happen as the the flow will run you see it ran and it changed the impact to low so the priority change to planning since this is inquiry or help request or incident and it assigned it right to customer support well this is just something very simple that you can do and typically people would have done use the workflow editor right they create workflow that point you know they've used the incident table and you know most people think well workflows traditionally used in catalog but it's obviously used for change etc but this using this the flow designer to handle small it to handle small operations like this or just just changing the impact in the assignment group it's best to use the flow designer at this point because it's much easier to use it took me literally a couple minutes to to create this the second one I wanted to show you it's called training request approval this is a little bit more involved so what this is is we do the same type of thing here for the trigger if a training request is created what are we going to what are we going to do we're going to update the training request record so we're going to change the state to awaiting approval and we're going to assign the ticket to customer support and then what we're going to do is we're going to ask for approval so basically we've got this you see this here we basically dragged this over to this so we grab the training request record and we drag it over here onto this record it's kind of it's called a data pill and as I mentioned earlier you can dot walk to these other you can down talk think of them like variables you can doubt walk to these other variables and dot walk to like the assigned to manage ceteris header so we'll show you that in a second here we have the training request record approval feel disapproval need to get pre-populated because this is extended from task and it already has those fields on there so the approval field in the journal field were automatically populated when I chose the ask for approval approved when so you can select approve anyone approves and then what you can do what I did here is I went I drilled down in here I've already got the training request record expanded so we can go down to oh where is it requested for expand that and then we grab the manager and that's you just drag that over here so basically it what it'll do is it'll create a an approval for the users manager automatically or reject anyone rejects so you do the same thing here you grab the manager and you throw the data pill right there and then what I did is I built in if an if statement and if-else statement so you can do it's similar to workflow instead of having to code it out or build grab if work full activities and things like that you can actually just build it out here so let's look at that this would be considered a flow activity or uh let's see here you show you so flow logic that's where you grab that stuff you can build these if for each to the following until do the following in parallel so if you want you want to do two things at the same time you can use this and and used to it you know you can build two actions decision you can do all this stuff that you do in the workflow editor so let's look at here we ask for approval if request is approved we update the training request record with state equals open and else if update training request is not approved its sets the state to closed complete so basically basically we just say if it's proved set it to open else closed it automatically and I'll show you how this works as well so let's look at the training request okay so let's request it for someone I know that has a manager we can use internal training for instance start date we can say next week on the 4th ends on the 8th test training ok and let's just save this so this will run when a training request is submitted and you this should flip ok you see that you see the state we've set the state to awaiting approval that was the first thing we did in the update record action the assignment group was set to customer support and the approval was generated so if we refresh this we'll see now now we'll see an approval down here we'll see an approval so Fred Lodi is the approver it's the manager of Adela so if we approve this watch what happens boom it's approved and the state is set to open so someone can pick it up and start working on it ok now let's try another one for the other condition Stella internal let's do the same thing starting on the fourth ending on the eighth let's do test training number two let's save it the workflow will fire in a second okay the state was set to awaiting approval customer support is the assignment group requested is the approval okay now let's refresh all right we see the approval down here and let's actually say okay well I need her that we excuse a lot of work we can't we can't have her in training we got to put her on a client you know so I'm gonna I'm gonna reject this for now okay so we rejected it let's wait to see what happens so it was rejected the approval is rejected the state was set to close to complete okay so if you look at this this basically says if request approved update the record state open else state is closed complete so this is another approvals are a very powerful thing you can do in the flow designer as opposed to using the workflow editor for someone that I know that so for those that are used to the workflow editor this is kind of hard to wrap your head around not not too bad but it's kind of a top-down approach but once you use it a few times it gets easier it I think it's you know for someone that doesn't do a lot of coding or scripting it is nice because you you have these data pills that you can choose from you can do a lot of stuff you can build decisions you can use decision tables if you've got complex up you know complex if-then statements so instead of building if-then statements you can use the decision table and build out options in there and utilize that instead of building a bunch of complex if-then statements so there's a lot of things you can do and these were just a couple of examples to show you and so flipping back to this you have several resources that you can you can utilize this is documentation and references which I use to build this deck out and there's tons of training as mentioned before it will show you a lot as you is you learn more about flow designer and hopefully it'll it'll become more comfortabie comfortable for you than than the workflow editor so I hope you enjoyed this this little session and thank you very much for joining [Music]