When configuring your incident types, you can customize your email notifications that are sent at each step of your incident flow process. For example, you may wish to modify the subject line to indicate the current status or include contents of the incident form within the body of the email to quickly inform the recipient. By default, a link to the incident will always be included in the email. If you have not yet set up your incident flows, please visit our Configuring Incident Workflows article.
In this article, we will review some best practices when setting up your incident email notifications.
Navigating to the Incident Flow Section
- Go to the Incident Types page by selecting the gear icon
next to Incidents in the left-hand navigation under FoodLogiQ Quality Management.
- Select an incident type you have already set up. If you have not yet created an incident type, visit our Incident Types article.
- The Incident Flow area is the second section on the page and can be best viewed by minimizing the Fields & Attributes section. Learn more about this section in our Incident Type Fields & Attributes article.
Customizing the Content of Email Notifications
You can modify the subject line and body of the message sent to the users you set to be notified when an incident is transitioned to a certain step.
- Click the
icon to view the default email notification.
- You can use the
button to populate fields from the incident or other details about the incident. For example, at each transition step, users can add an optional comment; you can include this by adding the Comment dynamic field ([currentStatus.Comment]) in your message. Note the five pieces of information that are standard in each email subject line, including [aliasID] and [incidentType].
3. Send an optional preview email. This email will give you a feel for how the email will appear in an inbox and allow you to confirm that your formatting and configuration meet your needs.
Note: The fields that you’ve added in brackets will remain as you see them on the template (e.g. “[descriptionOfIssue]”) because this incident type is not pulling in information from a live incident yet. For more information on testing incident configuration and notifications, visit our Testing Incidents Before Launch article.
4. Click OK once complete. See examples below.
Example 1: Notify an Incident Reporter that an Incident has been Resolved
Example 2: Notify an Incident Reporter that their Report has been Returned.
Who Receives Email Notifications?
Internal Steps:
When an incident transitions to this type of step, only internal users with the selected roles will receive a notification. If no selections are made, no one receives an email at this transition. One or more roles or the Incident Submitter (the user who originally created the incident) would need to be selected within the dropdown list. Location permissions and incident type permissions are taken into account when these emails are generated. For example, if you selected a "Restaurant" role to be notified, a user will only receive an email if they have access to the location where the incident was first reported and have the Restaurant role. To learn about setting up custom roles visit the article Creating Custom User Roles.
Here are some additional scenarios where you may want to include custom roles to receive email notifications:
- Alert your accounting department when credit has been issued.
- Notify incident submitter and/or users with a restaurant or regional manager role when a distributor has returned the incident requesting more information.
- Alert internal Quality Assurance team who reviews incidents for completeness before submitting to a distributor.
Product Supplier or
Supply Chain Member Steps:
At the Product Supplier or Supply Chain Member Steps there are multiple settings that determine who will get notified:
Supplier Locations - When incidents are reported and one of the supplier’s locations is specified on the incident, the supplier location’s Incident Reporting Contact will receive the email. *
Business Contacts for All Locations - If the supplier has not assigned location level contacts, or no supplier location is specified on the incident, then the supplier’s business-level incident contacts are notified. *
- If there are assigned business-level Incident contacts, they will receive emails.
- If there are no assigned business-level Incident contacts, then Community Contacts will receive emails for incidents.
*Please note – the Community Owner may need to review supplier location contact assignments and approve changes to locations prior to these notifications being sent. Please contact support@foodlogiq.com if notifications are not being received.
For more information on Incident Reporting Contacts, you can view the article here.
Distributor Steps:
The locations that appear in the distributor drop down menu are determined by the configured supply chain for the location reporting the incident. To learn more about supply chains, see the article Supply Chain Configuration. The Incident Reporting Contact assigned to the location that was selected in the Distributor field is the one who will receive the email notification. If these contacts are not identified, then the distributor’s business-level incident contact will receive the notification. If there are no such contacts, the distributor’s community contacts will be notified.
Your distributors may need to invite additional users into their accounts, then assign them as the relevant contacts per location. You can review which users are assigned to each location by adding the Incident Reporting Contact column to your Locations Shared With Me list. See example below.
Set up Due Dates
You can optionally configure due dates per flow step within your incident. Reminder emails will be sent at the specified number of days or hours you indicate until the step has been transitioned. The original recipients of the message will receive reminders. The message will be the same, with the addition of "REMINDER:" in its subject line.
Click the icon to adjust your settings. Once set and incidents are reported, you will be able to view the due dates within your Incident list view page and apply filters to determine which are past due.