Assignment shapes in processes
Assignment shapes represent tasks that users complete in a process. To ensure that your business process meets all your unique requirements, you can add an assignment shape for each place in a business process that requires human judgment and input.
For example, you can add assignments to the life cycle of a case to collect information from users with different roles or levels of expertise, such as a form that a recruiter completes after interviewing a job candidate and reviewing the list of necessary documents in the recruitment process. You can also increase the functionality of your application by assigning tasks to an external application or to a robotic queue.Assignment shapes
You can create assignments by adding certain steps, such as the Collect information, Approve/Reject, or Form steps, to a process in Case Designer or by adding one of the assignment shapes to a process on the Diagram tab on the Flow form, which gives you more configuration options.
You can add, and then configure, the following assignment shapes:
- Assignment
- The basic assignment shape that you use to collect data from users. The shape creates
a task in a work queue or worklist, so that a user can provide input to the process. For
example, you can use this shape in a mortgage case type to create a task for a case
worker to calculate a new interest rate.
For more information, see Flow shapes and Collecting information from a user.
- Assignment Service
- An advanced shape that you use to continue your work flow in an external system. The
shape calls an activity that requests and receives information from an external system
by using a connect rule. For example, you can use the shape to retrieve a customer's
financial history from an external system or department.
For more information, see Flow shapes and Assigning a task to an external application.
- Assign to robot queue
- An advanced shape that you use to call a robotic automation. For example, you can use
this shape to run an automation that analyzes the information submitted with an
insurance claim.
For more information, see Flow shapes and Assigning a task to a robotic work queue.
Assignment settings
You can decide how users process the assignments in your application by configuring the following settings:- Routing
- Determines who processes the assignment. In a typical scenario, a regular assignment
shape routes to a user (which in Dev Studio is known as the
current or specific operator, or worklist), or a team (which in Dev Studio is known as a work queue, and formerly also known as
workbasket).
For more information about the routing options, see Collecting information from a user, Assigning users automatically at run time, and Configuring custom routing logic for assignments.
- The service-level agreement
- Defines the recommended and required completion times for the assignment by creating
goals and deadlines for case workers.
For more information, see Completing work on time and Creating a service-level agreement (SLA) rule.
- Specification
- Provides a description for the step.
- Assignment configuration
- Defines assignment details such as harness, confirmation note, and screen navigation.
For more information, see Harnesses, Sending confirmations of completed assignments, and Creating navigation rules.
- Local actions
- Specifies local actions that users can choose to take before they complete the
assignment. At run time, local actions are displayed in the header of a case. To
configure a local action for an assignment, you create or select an existing flow
action. Submitting a local action at run time does not complete the current
assignment.
For more information, see About Flow Actions.
- Notifications
- Sends out correspondence, such as an email message, when a running flow creates an
assignment. Typically, the application sends this correspondence to one or more of the
work parties identified in the work item, and then reports progress to that party. Users
can select a notify activity, which is an activity of the notify activity type, on the
Security tab.
For more information, see Activity form - how to create activities for flows.
- Tickets
- Determines whether an assignment is associated with a ticket, which can be raised at
any time by any process in the same case. Processing is connected to a ticket to respond
to a business exception, error flow, or event, such as for example a user withdrawal
from processing.
For more information, see Creating a ticket.
- Optimization
- Records work item properties that you want to use in the optimization analysis with the Process Optimization tool, which performs probability analysis on assignments to identify common flow patterns and trends.
Assignment types for custom routing options
Each assignment in a process has a type based on the standard activity that creates the assignment. You can select a standard activity when you define the routing options for an assignment in a flow diagram in Case Designer. When you select the Custom routing option on an assignment shape on the Diagram tab of the Flow form, you can then select an assignment activity from the list in the Assignment Type field:
- Connect
- Creates an assignment that waits for an external system to perform processing before moving to the next step in the process.
- Dependency
- Creates an assignment that waits for an event to occur, such as the resolution of another case.
- External
- Uses the Directed Web Access feature to create an external assignment, for example, to
receive input from an external user.
For more information, see Directed Web Access in configuring assignments for external users.
- Work queue
- Creates an assignment that an application can route to a work queue that is common to
multiple users.
For more information, see Configuring custom routing logic for assignments, Creating a work queue and Assigning users automatically at run time.
- Worklist
- Creates an assignment that an application can route to the worklist of a current user
or a specific user that the router activity defines.
For more information, see Configuring custom routing logic for assignments and Assigning users automatically at run time.
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