Stages

A stage is the first level of organization for the tasks that are required to complete a work process. Stages visualize milestones or significant events in a case life cycle. Stages can also indicate a transition of work from one person to another. For example, in a case type for Job application reviews, you can create the following stages:

• Submission, in which an HR worker collects personal details and relevant documents from a job applicant.
• Review, in which a hiring manager conducts an interview with the job applicant and reviews submitted documents.
• Approval, in which an HR worker prepares onboarding information for the approved new hire.

Modularity in case types provides for more flexible work processing, because a case can reenter any stage, for example for additional input, or enter a stage only when the stage is relevant to a specific scenario.

To define a stage, which represents a milestone in your business case, you create processes that are collections or individual tasks.

Processes

A process consists of a series of tasks, or steps, and visualizes a set of actions within a stage. You can create a sequential process that is a basic set of tasks, and for each stage you can create multiple processes. By creating multiple processes, you group tasks into logical phases, instead of having a list of tasks that might seem to be loosely connected. For example, for the Submission stage of a recruitment process, you can add processes for Collect personal information and Collect documents. By adding multiple processes, you also 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 processing, you can also create parallel processes that can involve more case workers simultaneously. For example, one HR worker might collect personal details from a job applicant, while another HR worker collects the applicant's documents at the same time, as in the following example:

You populate processes by adding steps.

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. Pega Platform offers a wide choice of both user actions and automations that you can add to your case life cycle. As a result, you can model case types that exactly meet your business requirements. For example, for a Collect personal information process, you can add the following steps:

• Send email, which is an automation that sends a message to a job applicant.
• Collect information, which is a user action that a job applicant performs by providing personal details.
• Generate document, which is an automation that creates a document with an applicant's details.

Reusing assets in case types

To save time when you create a case type, you can reuse assets from an existing case type immediately upon creation. You can reuse data, views, and even an entire life cycle. For greater flexibility, you can go further and modify reused elements. For example, after you create a case type for reviewing job candidates, you can reuse its case life cycle in a case type for reviewing candidates for managerial positions, and then modify it to add additional actions.

Ensure that users have enough information to successfully resolve cases. For more information, see Providing data for cases.

For relevant training materials, see the Defining a customer Microjourney module on Pega Academy.