Your guide to Next Matter
Welcome to Next Matter. This article helps you to build your first workflow through the basics of Next Matter – including your first custom integration.
About Next Matter
With Next Matter, you can build end-to-end automation for all your operations that gives teams everything they need to do the job right.
In practice, this might be a form you send out to a candidate you want to hire, an automated Slack notification about tasks that need attention, a confirmation email that's sent out to your customers, a workflow that gets started when an external app sends a trigger and many more. Next Matter gives you the flexibility to handle small and big workflows and support you when your company grows.
You can read more about our use cases, here.
Get started
Master the lingo
When you start with Next Matter, you'll dive into building workflows and tracking instances. A workflow is your guiding recipe, leading you through your process, while an instance operates as a single cooking session utilizing that recipe.
Think of it this way: your workflow is the blueprint, outlining the steps. Your instances, on the other hand, are the tangible outcomes produced by following that blueprint. And here's the exciting part: for every workflow, you have the potential to generate hundreds of thousands of instances – a remarkable scale that used to demand manual handling. (Imagine cooking up the same recipe on a massive scale...)
Let's illustrate with an example, the Order Fulfillment Process:
- Workflow:
Envision order fulfillment as a series of actions to process and dispatch customer orders. You establish this structure once. - Instance:
Every time an order arrives and your team, suppliers and partners go through the motions of preparing, packaging, and shipping, you're triggering and tracking an instance of the automated order fulfillment workflow.
Design your first workflow
Next Matter workflows range from simple to multi-step workflows that integrate with third-party apps.
TIP: If you don’t have a specific workflow in mind and you’re just testing, let our AI help you. You just need to think of a process you’re trying to improve and add a short description of how you’d like to automate it with a workflow. Click Workflows > Create new > Create first workflow with AI and provide a description of the workflow. AI will generate a step-by-step suggestion you can use!
If you want to quickly test the workflow builder you can build your first own workflow based on our example below. In this workflow, you can assign a task to a person from outside your organization.
Use steps to map our scenarios
Next Matter workflows match each scenario. Situations when we need to make decisions, handle exceptions, work on multiple tasks in parallel, use different communication channels for different stakeholders, use data from multiple sources and ensure everything is updated can easily be mapped out in a workflow using different steps.
Each step helps you recreate your workflow – the way work happens – and automate it into workflows that scale. For example, a form step could be scanning a QR code in a rental car.
Involve your team
Workflows run quicker when you assign tasks to teams, and notify users of deadlines. We recommend exploring the options Next Matter gives you. In a nutshell:
- You can assign tasks to internal and external users, and monitor the workflow progress. Explore more...
- Users get notified through their Next Matter inbox. Explore more...
- You can build teams and assign roles to team members. Explore more...
- Users can ask questions directly in the workflow. Explore more...
Connect external tools
Next Matter connects with multiple third-party tools ( view complete list) to enable you to build complex and advanced workflows and cater to various user needs.
To make integrating easier and faster, we've built a number of ready-to-use templates, which you only fill in with your own data.
It's a good idea to build an integration workflow as you explore Next Matter. You can build one based on the video example below.
Build away
Next Matter can handle complex workflows - the only thing you need is a bit of code. If you are a low-code developer, the building opportunities are limitless. Explore Next Matter integrations, and build advanced workflows, fast.
Updated 29 days ago