For example, if your business objective is to review insurance claims, you might need to consider different scenarios while processing a claim. In a car accident insurance claim, a customer might file both body injury and vehicle damage claims. To process the case, and to estimate the total amount of money that the customer should receive in compensation, you need to process the injury and damage cases first. Using the results of these two cases, you can calculate the final insurance payout. To achieve this goal, you can create an Accident Claim parent case, and then Body Injury and Vehicle Damage child cases. You resolve the parent case only after all the child cases reach a resolution. Pega Platform refers to the relationship between parent and child case types as the case type hierarchy. The following figure presents a same case type hierarchy:

Making your work more granular also results in time and costs savings, because you can reuse child cases in different scenarios. For instance, in a claims process for a customer that files a car accident insurance claim that requires only a Body Injury child case, you can reuse your existing case types instead of creating a whole new business process. Reusing child case types increases the flexibility of your application, and helps you meet unique and dynamically changing needs. By using child case types as building blocks, you can resolve complex business cases and dependencies without planning and creating long, complicated case types.

Sharing data between cases

The following figure shows a graph that illustrates sharing data between parent and child case types:

Reusing child case types in different scenarios

When you want to define a reusable part of a business process, consider a set of tasks that you can complete independently of your main business process, and that you can apply in different scenarios. Analyze a sample scenario in which a bank reviews various requests from customers. The requests might include issuing a duplicate credit card, filing in a complaint, and making a loan request. After a customer service representative (CSR) resolves each request, a customer receives a short questionnaire to collect feedback. Collecting feedback is a separate process that includes creating a questionnaire, sending an email to a customer, sending a reminder after a week without a reply, and then analyzing the customer's feedback. The collecting feedback process can be the same for many other business processes, as shown in the following figure:

By reusing child case types in different scenarios, you speed up application development and provide a consistent experience for your customers.

What to do next: After you understand dependencies between your business processes, identify types of users that you need to involve in your cases. See Identifying people involved in case types.

For relevant training materials, see the Creating a child case module on Pega Academy.