Question 1

What's the difference between a business function and an objective?

Accepted Answer

A business function is who does the work. It's a team or department, like Maintenance Crew, and you use it to assign stage ownership and control who can see a process. An objective is what the work is for. A business objective, like "Reduce unplanned downtime," rolls up into an organizational objective, like "Operational Excellence." A process is tied to one of each: a function that runs it, and an objective it serves.

Question 2

What happens when I sign off a stage?

Accepted Answer

Cesflo checks every stage that depends on the one you just finished. If a stage's dependencies are all signed off now, it activates right away. If several stages were waiting on the same handoff, they can all activate at once. If nothing depends on it yet, nothing else happens.

Question 3

What's a sub-process stage?

Accepted Answer

A stage that hands off to an entire other process instead of one person signing off. When it activates, Cesflo starts a run of the linked process automatically. When that run finishes, the stage signs itself off and the parent process carries on. No one has to remember to close the loop.

Question 4

What does the critical flag do?

Accepted Answer

It's a visual flag, not a rule. A critical stage gets a red outline on the flowchart and shows up on the dashboard and process list while it's active. That makes it obvious at a glance which processes have safety- or schedule-critical work happening right now.

Question 5

Who can see a given process?

Accepted Answer

By default: its owner, an admin, and anyone directly assigned to one of its stages, either as a person or as a member of the assigned business function. Beyond that, an admin can grant a person or a role access to one specific process or an entire business function from the Access page. It's a real, explicit grant, not "everyone can see everything."

Question 6

What does "recurring" actually do?

Accepted Answer

It runs on a real schedule. Set a process to recurring in the builder and pick a cadence: daily, weekly, monthly, or continuous (the next run starts as soon as the last one finishes). Cesflo starts each run automatically when it's due. You can still start a run early or skip an occurrence from the process page.

Question 7

Can two people be working on a process at the same time?

Accepted Answer

Yes. If a process branches into parallel stages, like two teams isolating different systems before a shared next step, both stages activate together and their owners work independently. The next stage only activates once every branch feeding into it has signed off.

FAQ