Every office has rules that live in someone's head. "When the toxicology report comes back, notify the assigned ME." "If a case sits in review for more than three days, escalate it." "When a death certificate is filed, close out the intake checklist." Zeph's workflow automation engine takes those rules out of people's heads and runs them automatically — reliably, every time, with a full audit trail. And you configure all of it without writing a line of code.
Eleven Triggers to Start From
A rule begins with a trigger — the event that makes Zeph evaluate it. The engine now listens for eleven distinct events across the case lifecycle:
- Case created and case status changed
- Case assigned and field updated
- Document uploaded — fires the moment a file lands on the case
- Task completed
- Approval granted and approval rejected
- SLA breached — fires when a case crosses its deadline
- And more, covering the events your office actually cares about
Conditions That Match Real Policy
Triggers tell Zeph when to look; conditions tell it whether to act. Each rule can combine multiple conditions, and you choose how they're evaluated: AND (every condition must match) or OR (any condition matches). That single toggle covers the difference between "high-priority homicide cases" and "anything that's either high priority or a homicide."
Conditions also understand dates. The before, after, and within days operators let you write rules like "the autopsy is scheduled within the next two days" or "the case was opened more than thirty days ago" without any manual date math.
Actions That Actually Do the Work
When a rule matches, it runs one or more actions. Zeph can:
- Notify staff by role — every active user in that role on the case's office
- Send an SMS through your Twilio configuration for time-critical alerts
- Advance the case status to keep work moving without manual clicks
- Assign or reassign the case
- Trigger an outbound webhook — a secured HTTPS call to another system, with built-in protection against unsafe URLs and a structured event payload
Order, Short-Circuiting, and Safety
Rules run in priority order. When you enable stop on match on a rule, evaluation short-circuits after the first matching rule fires — handy for "first applicable rule wins" routing where you don't want three overlapping rules all firing at once.
Worried about flipping a rule live? Zeph includes a dry-run mode for administrators. Give it a trigger and a sample case context, and it reports exactly which rules would match and what they would do — without sending a single notification or changing any data. Test first, then turn it on with confidence.
Always Watching, Even Overnight
Some automation can't wait for a user to click something. Zeph runs background jobs that check for overdue cases and auto-advance cases that have been sitting in a stage too long, firing the same workflow rules you've configured. The result: deadlines get caught and cases keep moving even when no one is logged in.
See It Run on Your Workflow
Tell us the rules that live in your team's head today, and we'll show you how Zeph runs them automatically — with a complete, tamper-evident record of every action.