Thinking Out Loud: A Workflow Engine I Built at Work This Week

I was thinking about something that excited me at work this week, and I wanted to share it out loud. Imagine you have a flow covering Sales , Supply Chain , and Pre-Sales , all connected in a monolithic project . The flow might start with a BOQ , then produce a Purchase Request, then check if inventory is available — if yes, create a Quotation; if not, send a Request for Quotation (RFQ), then collect Supplier Quotations, and eventually move to purchasing, warehousing, and delivery to the client, with many branching cases at each step. Now imagine you want to know: where did this BOQ end up? You’d want a Stage column on each item in the flow, so when you open a BOQ it tells you “we’re currently at Material Issue stage”, and when you open a Supplier Quotation it tells you the same. A Live Query for this would be a nightmare given how branched and deep the flow is, so the better approach is storing the stage as a database column — and this wasn’t just the easier choice, the business requi