At Arbor, our mission is to transform the way schools and MATs work by saving you time on repetitive tasks, ensuring consistency across your organisation, and allowing your staff to focus on what matters most: your students.
Arbor Workflows is now a core addition to your Arbor MIS. It isn't a separate, standalone product; rather, it is a powerful engine built directly into your ecosystem to help you automate processes—from simple leave requests and student admissions to complex MAT-wide compliance checks.
What is Arbor Workflows?
Arbor Workflows allows you to build digital "paths" for your school processes. Every workflow begins with a Trigger Form to capture essential information. From there, the system takes over, moving the process through a series of human actions and automated steps.
Human Steps:
Decisions: Send approval requests (Yes/No) to specific staff members. Decision-makers can add comments, and the workflow can be set to automatically stop or rewind to a previous step if rejected.
Forms: Request additional information from specific users at any point in the process.
Checklists: Ensure that a list of tasks is completed before the workflow moves forward.
Automated Steps:
Send Email: Automatically notify stakeholders, parents, or staff.
Send Something (MIS Integration): Push data directly into your Arbor MIS—such as creating new student/staff records, uploading documents to profiles, or recording staff absences.
Add Follower: Keep relevant staff members in the loop without requiring them to take action.
Add a Delay: Pause a workflow for a set amount of time (e.g., "Wait 3 days before sending a follow-up").
Trigger Another Workflow: Create sophisticated chains of automation where one completed process starts the next.
Understanding Your Access
The features available to you in Arbor Workflows depend on your specific tier. We have tailored these tiers to meet the different needs of individual Schools and Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs).
For Schools:
Core: Perfect for simple processes, allowing for two-step workflows and access to our basic template library.
Comms: Expands your capabilities to 5-step workflows, including decisions, forms, and the ability to "Send Something" directly to your MIS.
Perform: Our most powerful school tier, allowing up to 15 steps, advanced conditional logic (e.g., auto-approvals or skipping steps), checklists, and workflow delays.
For Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs):
Essentials: Provides central team oversight and the ability to view school-level workflows.
Plus: Allows MAT leaders to "Push Down" standardised workflows to all schools, access an Analytics Dashboard, and update the Arbor MIS centrally.
Advanced: Our premium tier for complex operations, including third-party software integrations (Google/Microsoft), archiving features, and advanced data syncing.
Not sure which features your package includes or want to discuss an upgrade? Reach out to us at customersales@arbor-education.com, and we'll be happy to help!
Transitioning from Habitude
You may notice references to "Habitude" in some older documentation or legacy processes. Habitude is now Arbor Workflows. As part of this transition, we have more deeply integrated the tool into the Arbor MIS interface. This means a more seamless experience, better data security, and a unified look and feel. As you explore this knowledge base, you will find "How-To" guides and best practice articles designed to help you get the most out of your specific tier.
Ready to get started? Learn how to build from our Template Library or Create your workflow from scratch.