Designing Your First Quantin Workflow: Inputs, Policies and Outputs
Learn how to translate a business process into a reliable Quantin workflow with explicit inputs, decision policies, outputs, owners, and acceptance criteria.
A Quantin workflow is a repeatable path from observation to decision. The strongest workflows make the operating contract visible: what enters the system, which rules shape reasoning, what may be produced, and where a human must intervene.
Map the workflow before automating it
Write the current process in plain language. Identify the trigger, the minimum information needed to begin, the decisions made along the way, and the final consumer. If the human process depends on undocumented judgment, capture examples before attempting automation.
Define the input contract
For each source, record its format, owner, expected update frequency, and failure behavior. A workflow should know whether missing data is acceptable, whether stale information should stop a run, and whether two sources must agree before reasoning continues.
| Input property | Question to answer |
|---|---|
| Authority | Is this the system of record? |
| Freshness | How old may the input be? |
| Completeness | Which fields are mandatory? |
| Fallback | What happens when the source is unavailable? |
Turn policy into explicit gates
Policies should be testable. Replace “use caution” with a rule that defines thresholds, permissions, and escalation paths. Separate reasoning guidance from deterministic controls. The intelligence layer may recommend an action, while policy code decides whether that action is allowed.
Specify the output
Describe the output as a schema rather than a paragraph. A decision object might contain a recommendation, evidence references, confidence, detected risks, an expiry time, and the required approval level. Structured outputs make monitoring and integration more reliable.
Establish acceptance criteria
- The result cites the evidence used.
- Uncertainty is visible and calibrated to the task.
- Restricted actions cannot bypass approval.
- Failures create an actionable alert.
- Every run has an owner and an audit record.
Start narrow, then expand
Test the workflow on historical examples and controlled live cases. Add integrations and autonomy only when the existing path is observable, recoverable, and consistently useful.