Update: Kotive now automatically retries failed tasks in workflows.

We’re all working smarter by letting technology take care of our repetitive tasks, but sometimes things still go wrong.

The service for sending your emails might be down, there might be a problem with the template you use for generating PDFs, or perhaps you made a typo in your automated task’s setup.

If any task in your workflow failed, you’ll see a “Retry?” link instead of the usual link to “Continue” in the “Live Workflows” view.

A busy record label is working on tight deadlines for their album releases. Daniel, the team leader in the Design Department, realizes the need for another Graphic Designer - album covers and promotional material piles are building up. He needs a new employee with the right qualifications, fast! The challenge is to get the right person for the job as soon as possible.

When you’re running a business, it’s not uncommon for things to get forgotten, lost in your inbox, and eventually done late and out of order. How often have you had to apologize to a customer for delivering after the deadline? And how many times has a job been completed, only for you to realize that the deposit hasn’t even been paid yet?

These problems slow down your business operations, lowering your overall productivity and your monthly turnover.

As a preschool teacher you are in the fortunate position to be entrusted by parents with the wellbeing and development for their child. The time you spend with each child, accomodating individual personalities, backgrounds and different levels of development, has an impact on their future and who they are. With 10 or more children in your class it is apparent that you need resources to help you stay focussed. In this context we believe that preschool assessment should not take you away from this important focus but should rather contribute to it.

One of our customers offer 60+ training workshops. At the end of every workshop they used to copy&paste every attendee’s details to a Word doc template in order to create a personalized attendance certificate in PDF. Not anymore.

It can be tricky to manage expense claims, when your team is on the road all day, seeing customer after customer, arriving home late and then getting back on the road early the next morning, with hardly any time to get to the office. Before you know it, it is month-end and all the expenses incurred during the month need to be submitted to the financial department before the end of the day.

Entrepreneurs are brilliant at spotting opportunities that previously went unnoticed. They show alertness to potential opportunities that their peers would decline and walk away from.

A serial entrepreneur once commented that 70% of all business opportunities have not yet been discovered. There is an ocean of opportunities all around us, yet we often battle to find new business opportunities; this is the conundrum that we’ll address in this post.

A recipe or blueprint for finding new opportunities does not exist.

When contemplating the birth of a new business the burning question on your mind should be:

“Am I planning to enter a growing or a dying market?”

Brad Rosser in ‘Better Stronger Faster’

It is easier to make money in a market that is large and growing than in a market that is stagnant, declining or small.

When starting a new business you want to maneuver all the advantage you can get. You know there is going to be challenging times ahead – but as far as possible you want to stack the deck in your favor.

If you are the person responsible to implement the “church welcome” strategy for new visitors, or maybe you’re in charge of church administration, then you probably have some sort of system in place to collect names, telephone numbers and other information from first-time visitors each week…

Maybe, during the announcements, you ask if anyone is visiting for the first time. If you’re really well organised, you probably have a team of people ready to distribute welcome packs to those who raise their hands. And maybe you invite the newcomers to get a free ‘Cappuccino-and-Love-Bomb-Cupcake-Combo’ at the church coffee shop after the service.

Amy stares up into the clouds as a plane flies over the sky scrapers. “I wish it were me on that plane, I could surely do with a holiday. I would go skiing, or take a trip to the beach, maybe something more secluded like the lake house…” Amy’s thoughts are stopped as her phone rings. It’s back to the office, and ironically to a stack of leave applications to review!