Create a workflow for your management process

Workflow statuses to communicate the phases of the process

The purpose of the statuses in the workflow is to model the management of proposals and communicate to participants at what stage the proposal is in the process. Orchidea's workflow must have at least one status before a proposal submission form can be created for the channel.

There are two ways to create a workflow:

• You can create it with our best-practice templates in a few seconds.
• Build your own workflow step by step. 

If you are new to Orchidea, we recommend that you start with a template. If you start with a template, you can still customize the management process to suit your own needs by creating, editing, and removing statuses.

Create a workflow with a template

If you want to create the workflow and the whole channel quickly with a template, follow the instructions in our article Creating a channel with a template.

Create your customized workflow statuses

When you create a new channel, you need to create a workflow with at least one status before you can create the proposal submission form.

1. Create a new channel by clicking + New Channel in the left navigation. Select Continue without template.
   
   1. 
2. Add a name and description for the channel, and choose if it's private or public.
3. Click on Start building a workflow in the newly created channel
   
4. Click + New status to create the first status for the channel
   
5. Write a Status name and an optional Status description if needed. You must also specify its type as either Active or Closed.
   1. Choose status type Active if proposals normally stay in the status temporarily and move forward to the following statuses after a while.
   2. Closed type is for statuses where the processing ends, for example, "Approved" or "Archived". The status types are utilized in reporting when end-to-end lead times are calculated.
      
6. Click Submit to create the new status.
7. To change the order of statuses drag it with your cursor to your preferred place.
8. If you want to delete a status press on the button on right corner of the status. From there press . Be aware that you can only delete statuses that don't have proposals.