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Workflow is a powerful concept that allows an entity, such as a
Help Desk Incident, to be "assigned" to a group. Commence
RM: Australian Edition now supports Workflow, and automates several
processes to help manage your business rules and implement a
Workflow.
Example: Managing a Help Desk Incident
To explain how Commence can help to manage a workflow, we are going
to examine the process of handling a Help Desk Incident.
When a customer calls with a problem, depending on the nature of
the problem it may be assigned to several different groups: for
example, technical support, software support, hardware repairs,
development or billing. You may also assign it to a dealer for review
if your business works through a channel model.
When a call is initially taken, the process may be to assign to
Technical Support for investigation. The Technical Support engineer
can then either resolve the issue or assign to another appropriate
group for further assistance, say Hardware Repair. You may have a
business rule that only Technical Support engineers can close the
incident, so Hardware Repair assigns the incident back to Technical
Support to be closed. The last step is then to assign the incident to
Billing, so an invoice can be sent or credit card charged.
Commence allows you set easily configure any of these stages, or
modify the stages to suit the process in your organisation.
Assigning the Workflow
When the incident is first logged, it is assigned to Technical
Support by default. When they start their desktop, they will be
present with a view of all incidents currently assigned to Technical Support
An engineer can then select an incident for further work (and make
a connection to indicate he is handling it). The engineer reviews the incident and determine that in this case
it is a hardware issue and so can easily reassign, just by clicking on
"Hardware Service" in the connection control.
The incident will then automatically appear on the Hardware Service
desktop.
This provides a very efficient way to share information around
your organisation, while managing the group that has current
responsibility.
Automating the Workflow
The workflow can also be configured to define various stages, and
automate the next step. Each step in the workflow can be configured
through the detail form.
When a stage in the workflow is designated as complete, Commence
will automatically move it to the next stage. Optionally, you can also
configure a message that will be presented to the user that marks it
as complete.
Completing a Stage
When a workflow stage is complete, moving to the next stage is
easy; simply click the Completed button.
Now the Workflow Assignment is updated, and the user is presented
with a message.
The Accounts desktop now updates to automatically include the new
incident
These same workflow techniques can be applied to other areas in
Commence as well. For example you might want to use the same technique
to manage your opportunities, and move from stage to stage in the sale
process, providing information about steps that should be completed in
each stage.
To try out the latest version of the Australian Edition, go to the download
section on our web site.
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