Case life cycle elements
Visualize your work, organize tasks, and achieve the goals of your business process by defining the case life cycle. Creating the case life cycle is a technique that you can use to model a path that your case follows to resolution by grouping tasks in a logical and practical way.
After you identify the main elements and their relationships in your case types, start dividing your business processes into smaller parts. As a result, you can design your case type in the same way as you think about your work. Each case life cycle consists of the following elements that you can iteratively define:- Stages that consist of processes
- Processes that consist of steps
- Steps that are either automations or user actions
Stages
Stages are milestones in the case type, and they can indicate a transition of work from one department to another. For example, if your case type is to hire a candidate, you can create Application review, Interview, Decision, and Job offer stages, where each stage includes a set of different actions, and is performed by a different group of people.
Processes
A process consists of a series of tasks, or steps, and visualizes a set of actions within a stage. For example, for Application review stage of hiring a candidate, you can add processes for Collecting personal information and Collecting documents. By adding multiple processes, you group tasks into logical phases and model the order in which case workers complete tasks, because a case moves to the next process when all of the steps from the previous process are complete.
To speed up case resolution, you can configure parallel processes that involve more case workers simultaneously. For example, in the Decision stage of hiring a candidate, one HR worker conducts a reference check and the other HR worker conducts the candidate's background check.
Creating processes saves time because you can reuse a process in different stages and case types. For example, you can reuse the Collecting documents process from the reviewing job applications in other case types.
Steps
Steps are the smallest elements of a case life cycle and represent single tasks or assignments. A step can be a user action or an automation that an application performs. For example, for a Collecting personal information process, you can add Send email step, which is an automation that sends a message to a job applicant.
- Stages in a case life cycle
Visualize the milestones in the journey towards your business goals by adding stages to a case life cycle. By creating stages, you organize work into sequential and logical phases that help you achieve your business objectives.
- Processes in a case life cycle
Organize related tasks in your business case by adding a process to a stage. With processes, you can control the order of events in your case, in addition to who performs the work and in what manner.
- Steps in a case life cycle
A step in your case life cycle represents a single assignment in your business process. By adding a step, you define a task that a user, your application, or an external application performs to move a case closer to resolution.
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