Notifications Settings

Notifications

The Notifications tab is where you configure email alerts that go out automatically when something happens on the shop floor. Three categories of event are supported, each with its own section, recipients, and email template.

Open the tab from App Settings → Notifications.

Email notifications are simpler than Webhooks. For Slack / Teams / ERP / arbitrary HTTP integrations, use Webhooks; for “ping someone’s inbox when X happens”, use this tab.

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Table of contents

1. What this tab is for
2. The three notification types
3. Task Blocked Notifications
4. Order Ready Notifications
5. Order Completed in Department Notifications
6. Email templates and placeholders
7. Recipient lists
8. Enabled flag
9. Where notifications are sent from
10. Tips and best practices

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What this tab is for

Three rules engines, each on a separate card:

Section	Trigger
Task Blocked Notifications	A worker marks any task as Blocked on the Kiosk.
Order Ready Notifications	An order’s first card arrives at a specific watched workstation.
Order Completed in Department Notifications	An order’s last task in a specific department is completed.

The first section is a single global rule (one email list); the second and third are per-workstation / per-department rule lists, so you can have different recipients for different teams.

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The three notification types

Task Blocked Notifications

A simple card with:

• Enable Toggle — turn it on or off.
• Recipient Emails — a dynamic list of email inputs (up to 5).
• Save button.

Every time any worker blocks any task on the Kiosk, every recipient on this list gets an email summarising:

• The job and order.
• The workstation.
• The block reason note.
• The employee who blocked it.

Use this as a supervisor escalation — when a blocker happens, the right person hears about it within minutes.

Order Ready Notifications

A list of per-workstation rules. Each rule says: “When an order’s first card arrives at workstation X, email these people.”

The card shows a table:

Column	What it shows
Workstation	Which station triggers this rule.
Recipients	Count of recipients.
Enabled	Green if on, grey if off.
Actions	Edit, Delete.

Click Add Rule to open the dialog (see below). One rule per workstation — workstations already covered by a rule show a “in use” badge in the workstation dropdown so you can’t create duplicates.

Use this for handoffs between teams — e.g., when an order’s first card hits the Packing workstation, the shipping coordinator’s team gets pinged that the order is almost out the door.

Order Completed in Department Notifications

Same pattern as Order Ready but per-department instead of per-workstation. Each rule says: “When an order’s last task in department X is completed, email these people.”

Use this for stage completions — e.g., when an order’s Paint department work finishes, downstream Packing knows the order is ready to pull.

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Email templates and placeholders

When you Add or Edit a rule (in Order Ready or Order Completed), the dialog includes:

• Workstation / Department dropdown.
• Email Subject — a single-line input.
• Email Body — a multi-line textarea.
• Placeholder Token buttons — click to insert a token at the cursor position (or at the end of the field) into the Subject or Body.

Available tokens vary slightly by rule type:

Token	Replaced with…
{order_no}	The order’s reference number.
{client_name}	The customer’s name.
{workstation} (Order Ready only)	The watched workstation’s name.
{department} (Order Completed only)	The department’s name.
{job_count}	How many jobs were affected.
{job_names}	A comma-separated list of job names.

Click any token button below the input fields to insert it. A typical email body might be:

“Order {order_no} for {client_name} is now ready at {workstation}. {job_count} job(s): {job_names}. Please collect when convenient.”

The template renders with the actual values when the email is sent. Tokens that don’t apply (e.g., {workstation} in an Order Completed body) just render as the literal text.

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Recipient lists

Every rule (and the global Task Blocked rule) has a list of recipient emails:

• Maximum 5 recipients per rule.
• Add / Remove buttons to manage the list.
• Empty inputs are stripped on save.
• Email format is validated.

Need more than 5 recipients? Create a distribution alias in your email system (e.g., [email protected]) and add the alias as a single recipient.

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Enabled flag

Every rule has its own Enabled toggle. Turning it off keeps the rule in the system (recipients, template, workstation/department) but silences it.

Useful for:

• Temporarily pausing alerts during a planned outage or a refit.
• Building rules in advance and only turning them on once everything is configured.
• Quickly toggling per-shift coverage without removing the rule.

The Enabled state is shown as a green / grey indicator in the rules table.

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Where notifications are sent from

• The sender / from address is your account’s company email (set in General Settings).
• The mail transport uses your account’s configured SMTP setup (this is back-end configuration; talk to support if delivery is failing or marks as spam).
• Notifications are dispatched asynchronously — there’s a small delay between the event and the email arriving.

If a notification fails to send, the failure is logged on the server but doesn’t block the underlying event (a blocked task is still blocked even if the alert email never goes out).

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Tips and best practices

• Don’t over-notify. A rule that fires too often is a rule that gets ignored. Pick the events that actually need someone’s attention — Task Blocked on critical machines, not on every minor speed bump.
• Use distribution aliases for teams. “shipping-team@…” is one recipient slot but reaches everyone on shipping. Easier to manage when staff change.
• Make subjects scannable. Lead with the most important token: [BLOCKED] {order_no} reads better than Task blocked update for order {order_no}.
• Keep bodies short. Field staff often read alerts on their phones — three lines max, with the actionable bit in the first.
• Use the Enabled toggle for shift coverage. If a rule should only fire during day shift, you can manually toggle morning and evening — or write two rules with different recipients and toggle between them.
• Combine with Webhooks. Email is for humans; webhooks are for systems. A blocker can both email the supervisor and fire a Slack webhook to the team channel — no conflict.
• Test by triggering the event. Block a real test task → confirm the email arrives → check formatting. Catch surprises before you set 12 rules and then realize a placeholder didn’t render the way you expected.
• Match recipients to event scope. A Paint Shop completion rule shouldn’t email the Cutting lead; tight scoping keeps signal high.