Ideas Hub Turns 1!

One year ago, we launched our brand new Ideas Hub – a resource dedicated to capturing your ideas for future product innovation. The Ideas Hub made it easier than ever to submit your product ideas to the SafetyChain team and receive updates on where those ideas stood. Since then, we’ve been busy reviewing, designing, developing & releasing your ideas. 

Let’s take a look back over the past year and celebrate:

• To date, there are 700+ Ideas in the Hub, with ~30 new ideas being submitted every month

• 1500 users from multiple industries, roles, and backgrounds have shared their voice - supporting their customer community by submitting and voting on Ideas

• Every month, we ‘Released’ ~5 of your ideas, while continuing to also provide and deliver additional features and enhancements using your valuable feedback

• Every development sprint, our team picked up your most-voted Ideas and got to work. To date, we have 19 Ideas ‘In Development’ and 82 Ideas in a ‘Planned’ state, ready to be scoped & put into action.

• ‘Forms’ was consistently the top category for submitted ideas, so beginning in 2024, we have a new Roadmap deliverable where we’ll begin reimaging Forms and using your Ideas to help shape the future of what this may look like. Keep the feedback & Ideas related to this topic coming!

• High vote counts on submitted Ideas helped us see where value may quickly be achieved - In November ‘22, we released “Create Submission Requirement to Attach Pictures” which provided the ability to require an attachment on any field in Form Designer, helping to ensure you don’t miss out on the huge value that visual documentation brings. If you missed this one, click here to view the demo video.

• Your Ideas also continued to make an impact and drive change within the product after it was ‘Released’, like this idea for SPC charts in LINK, “Increase decimal places to 4”. While the original Idea was implemented in July ‘23, we continued expanding upon it month after month by adding the ability to configure 0 decimal places on all Record Chart types and the ability to add decimal configurations for summary values for SPC charts.

• Finally, your Ideas continue to solve real business problems, as seen in the example of “Auto Logout on Mobile Apps”. You noticed times where Users weren’t properly logging out, causing issues with shared devices or tablets and presented a way to solve this. From there, we implemented your Idea, and the PC App now supports Session Management where, after displaying a warning message, will auto-logout Users based on idle time (minutes of inactivity) when logged into the PC App.

It’s been a foundational year for the Ideas Hub and we thank you for continuing to help drive the SafetyChain product with your Ideas! 

While we have more of your ideas becoming available in the future (such as in the case of Supplier Management), we encourage you to continue submitting, viewing suggestions from other users, lending support to your favorite suggestions by following (voting), and tracking the progress of those ideas along the way via the Ideas Hub.

Looking ahead, we’re continuing to refine and enhance the way the Ideas Hub is managed, with the intention of providing you with more visibility and transparency into the status of your Ideas in the future. We highly recommend you to view the most current statuses of your ideas in the Ideas Hub, keeping the following updated definitions of each status in mind:

• Reviewing: This is the default status your idea will fall into and guarantees that SafetyChain has received it and is taking it under consideration. At this point, a Product Manager will be assigned to review, gather any additional information that may be needed relating to the idea, and update the status once a decision has been made on the path forward. 

• Merged: This status will display when the idea has been consolidated into a previously submitted, and similar, idea. The vote count on the merged idea will carry over into the previously existing idea and the merged idea will also display at the bottom of the existing idea for reference. 

• Declined: This status signals that the idea will not be pursued by SafetyChain for the foreseeable future. There may be many reasons an idea is declined, such as not fitting in with the current company strategy or the functionality may be rethought or removed altogether in future versions. A status of ‘declined’ in no way means that the idea was a bad one, it simply just means “not right now”.

• Closed: The idea was addressed in another way, such as already being in place by a previously existing feature, or the idea may have actually been a support request that was able to be resolved or provided a workaround solution.  

• Backlog: The idea has been accepted into the product backlog and is up for voting by the broader customer community. Backlog ideas will be prioritized for future development based on popularity, expected customer impact, and alignment with SafetyChain strategy.

• In Development: Work on this idea is currently underway and will be made available to you in future months.

• Released: The idea has been deployed and is now available for use.
  

More Information
To learn more on how the Ideas Hub works and the intention behind it, visit this previously posted Spotlight post, “One Source to Submit, View, and Track Your Product Ideas” in the Improvements Hub. You may also find more information on how to use the Ideas Hub, including a demo video, in our Knowledge Base article titled, “SafetyChain Ideas Hub”. If you still have any questions or concerns, feel free to reach out directly to our Support team at any time. 

As always, your feedback and Ideas mean a lot to us and we look forward to reading through each and every one of them. We’ll continue working to improve this process even more in the future and will provide any updates as these changes occur. Keep an eye out on the Ideas Hub for updated statuses and the Monthly Release Notes for any ‘Released’ Ideas to be showcased - we highly value your input and help in shaping our product as the manufacturing world continues to evolve and grow!