Guided Flows: the SOP your crew actually follows

Every business has the folder of procedures. Very few have crews who read it. The SWMS gets signed at induction and never opened again; the prestart gets done properly in week one and from memory in week five.

The problem is not that workers are careless. It is that a procedure written as a document is something you have to remember to consult, on a phone, in the rain, with gloves on. Guided Flows turn the procedure into the thing you are already doing.

Three nouns, and only three

A SOP is one procedure, in a shared library. Written once, used everywhere.

A process is an ordered playlist of SOPs. "Start of day on a civil site" might be: site sign-in, machine prestart, toolbox, then the work.

A flow is a worker walking that process on their phone. One screen at a time, next step after the last.

The library matters more than it sounds. Because SOPs are shared, editing one changes every process that uses it. The alternative — a copy of the prestart inside each process — is how you end up with nine versions and no idea which one the crew is on.

The steps do real work

This is the part that separates it from a checklist app. A step is not a box to tick; it is an action that writes a record.

• Clock in and clock out. The shift actually starts and ends.
• Prestart. The machine's checklist is filed, and a defect raises a triage task.
• Site and task comments. Notes, photos and voice notes land on the record.
• File upload. Straight onto the job.
• Use an item. Materials come off stock, costed to the job.
• Sign a docket. A real docket, signed on site.
• Record an entry. Truck loads, machine hours, metres — whatever your operations measure, counted against the contract line.
• Induction. Completed and signed, then it counts.
• Setup steps that add a machine, add an operator, assign someone to a site, set a site's document requirements or hand out another flow.

So at the end of a flow you do not have a completed form. You have a started shift, a filed prestart, a signed docket, materials drawn, quantities recorded and photos attached to the right job — which is what the office needed anyway.

There are also routing steps. A decision sends the worker down a different branch depending on their answer, and a continue step hands them into the next process. Real work is not linear, and neither is a good flow.

It survives real conditions

Workers can go back a step, and a round can be restarted. Someone who typed 4.5 instead of 45 should be able to fix it without ringing the office, and a flow that punishes a mistake is a flow people learn to avoid.

Can subcontractors run your process?

Two step types work across companies on purpose. You can offer a process to another business working on your site, and it is cloned for them, so their crew walks your procedure on their own phones under their own login.

That is how a small head contractor gets consistency out of subbies without pretending to employ them — and it is the same mechanism behind offering operations and site access, covered in Site compliance: a document wallet, not a folder of PDFs.

Who sees what

A worker in a flow sees a slim screen: the step in front of them and nothing else. There is no second app and no separate "field mode" — the menu is one shape for everybody, and how much of it exists is decided by what the person is allowed to do.

Admins can preview exactly what a given worker will see before assigning anything, which is the fastest way to find out that your beautifully designed process opens with a step that person has no permission to complete.

Where should you start?

Do not model the whole business. Take the one procedure that gets done inconsistently — usually the start of day — and build that. Run it with one crew for a week.

The app is free up to ten licences, where a licence is one active team member or one active site. Sign in with Google, Microsoft or Apple at app.sitesai.net, or read Running a small civil crew from one app.