New Department

Sorry but the only field is the DATE_STAMP that would show new and changed departments... I would usually just create a process flow to send a list in an email saying the department is either new or changed in the last month.

If that is not good enough then you will need to do something to list the departments each month and then run a report against the departments from the prior month as a comparison - updating the comparison file each month. Access might be an adequate tool to do it in. (Processflow would be a good tool to do this if you have someone skilled in programming it ... If you have someone that can create a flow you could have a monthly scheduled flow pull Active departments and then write them to a file on your server and then have the flow look at that file as a comparison.)

 

** Had an additional thought - maybe you could have the descriptions populated one way for new departments and then have processflow identify the new departments from what is entered in the description field and then use an AGS to change it after you are notified.   I had a process on a field a while back where we put a code in front of the field + or - and then that was used by the flow to say it was an add or delete...   The flow would then remove the extra character...   (I don't know how the Security fields are used but maybe you could have them default to one value and then change them in a flow after you get notified of the new department...)

 

Julia,
I could not sleep so I created a processflow that does this... Always wanted a reason to learn how to use the file access and iterator nodes. However, you need to have Process Flow Integrator to do it because it needs to be able to write to and read from a file.  It is slower than I expected but it seems fine if it is only going to run monthly...  Do you have PFI?

I am not in the office until Monday and will check then. I do hope so as this would be very useful to us. Thanks,

I believe that you could also create a SmartNote to compare the departments and send you an email when something changes. 

Indeed, that is one of the underlying fundamental uses of Lawson Smart Notification, to detect and notify of changes in datasets. Assuming, of course, that you have a license for it. The "poor man's approach" is to use a database trigger.

I don't have Smart Notifications... (I do quite a bit with Process Flow that would probably fit Smart Notifications better but I can't afford to have Smart Notifications. To me it seems like these two should run from the same tool - makes more sense as one integrated tool because they can do some of the same things - in different ways.)

Process Flow Integrator question:
Does anyone know if you need to "have" PFI to run flows with PFI nodes.... In the past, flows created with Process Flow Professional would run on a system that was not using professional. The license was more for the designer tool. I am wondering if someone creates a flow in PFI - would it run for someone that just has standard?
 

Yes, you can run PFI flows without PFI, you just can't change them.

Thanks for the info on PFStandard vs PFIntegrator

Julia, if you do not have Smart Notifications and are able to use processflow I would be willing to share my flow with you.... It is actually rather simple:

1. Scheduled to run on the first of the month
2. Looks for date_stamps in the past month
3. Checks (just those with date stamps) against a CSV file that has a record for each department [company, process level, department]
4. If it finds the department it assumes it is just a change - if it does not find the department in the CSV it sends an email and appends the department information to the end of the CSV file