Wait for attachment

[Dan Munns]

Hi,

I am creating a BPM for our equipment move process and need to make sure that all moves have a plan attached to the call.

I was hoping for it to be nice and simple with a suspend-wait for attachment option but sadly this is not the case.

The adding of the attachment is a checkpoint and is required but I want to make to as automated as possible rather than the analysts attach the file and then have to do something else to complete the check point.

Any help/ideas appreciated!

Thanks

Dan

[James Ainsworth]

Hi Dan,

Thanks for your post.  The suspend and wait for attachment seems to be one of the few actions that does not have an accompanying suspend option.  We can look to see if this is something that we can provide.

The creation of a task is possibly the best alternative.  There are also some benefits to using tasks as these will be listed in the assignee's Activities Calendar which can help a user manage their time for completing these plans.  Also, you can use parallel tasks within your BPM so as part of a workflow for a move you can assign out multiple tasks that can be done at the same time.

Regards, 

James

[Dan Munns]

Hi James,

At the moment I have added the attachment form into the BPM and made it mandatory. The issue is that we don't always have the plans in place when the move is first requested which means that rather than use the portal, as I would like, users will just email the request to us and we will have to log it manually.

I understand that the 'wait for attachment' could be circumvented with any file attachment but at the moment this is a better option than anything else I can think of.

Rather than a task the analyst has to perform the plan come from the team requesting the move and so I would like to suspend the BPM until we are emailed the plan.

If this is not possible then I will have to think of some other ways of doing it.

Thanks

Dan

[James Ainsworth]

There is something that may help which we are looking at introducing and that is the ability to have definable sub-statuses for a request.  For example an Open request may have a sub-status of With Customer. When one of these sub-statuses are selected, it can determine if the request is put on hold or not.  If on hold this will limit the actions that can be done on the request until the customer has responded.