With its unique Plug-in architecture, Flow makes it super easy to connect to multiple “automated” data sources. In some cases though, it is still required to capture data manually.
Think about remote assets where automating this is just not worth the investment or the source of the data is captured by people (think about safety incidents, etc.)
Flow has the unique capability to cater for this by the means of manually entered forms. Now data can be sourced from automated as well as “manual” data sources to be used by the Flow engine to calculate powerful KPI’s and measures.
Better yet, manually entered data can be used to augment automatically retrieved day. So now, you can do things like work out your production losses using a combination of the automated production line counts and the manual stock take done in the warehouse!
The look-and-feel of data entry in a Flow form is similar to most spreadsheet applications, allowing for rapid capturing of data.
Forms can also be used to audit data that was captured automatically from a data source. This is great to audit and correct data in Flow. Flow will always keep a complete audit trail of any data point being edited through the Form capability.
Again, keeping true to the Flow “drag and drop” concept, Forms can be created in the Flow configuration tool. Being fully HTML based, Forms are hosted by the Flow server in the same environment where users will access their Dashboards and Charts.
The same security model applied to dashboards and charts can be applied to Forms, making sure users only have access to Forms that they are given access to.