Federated Case Management (FCM) enables you to connect Pega Platform™ applications. Users in a federation (a group of applications connected by FCM) work in their local application portal, which can display cases and assignments from other applications in the federation. Each local application processes and maintains its own cases and data, and publishes data to a centralized database, the Federated Case Management Repository (FCMR).

This article does not describe installation and configuration; it introduces basic concepts and features:

• Overview
• Creating and working on remote cases
• The Federated Case Management Repository (FCMR), and how data is published to the FCMR
• The federated worklist view
• The federated case list view
• The FCM Landing Page

For configuration information, see Setting up and configuring Federated Case Management.

Overview

Federated Case Management (FCM) facilities enable users logged on to a Pega Platform application to create, display, update, and resolve cases in applications hosted on other systems from within their current application portal. Consolidated views of cases and assignments can be viewed from within any application portal in a federation. These views are enabled by the new FCM repository (FCMR), a central database to which applications in a federation publish case and assignment data.

Sample configurations for FCM include:

• A front-end call-center application, such as Pega Customer Process Manager for Financial Services (CPM-FS), federated with financial service backend systems like Pega Service Case Manager (SCM-FS) and SmartDispute.

• A distributed application, in which multiple data centers in different locations are running the same Pega Platform applications against different production databases.

Creating and working on remote cases

In a federated system, the terms local and remote are relative to a specific user and to a specific case: Each user on a federated system logs into a single application, his or her local application. Remote cases (that is, cases in other applications within the federation) can be created, viewed, and worked on from within the user’s local application portal. No re-design of any application’s user interfaces is required.

The application in which a case type is defined is the local application for all cases of that type. FCM enables users logged into other, remote application to create, view, and work on cases of that type from within the remote application portal as though it were a local case. All processing for each case still occurs in its local application, and all of the data related to each case is still stored in its local application’s database.

In practice, the distinction between local and remote cases is irrelevant to the user. The FCMR consolidates work items and makes them available to all users in the federation. Users generally do not need to know the source of a case or assignment. All work performed on a case occurs in its local application, and all data for a case is stored in its local application’s database.

The Federated Case Management Repository (FCMR)

The FCMR contains class tables for federated versions of key Pega Platform classes, for example, Work-Federated and Assign-Worklist-Federated. Instances of the federated classes serve as lightweight pointers to cases residing in a federation’s local application databases.

To make publishing data to the FCMR as efficient as possible, federated classes in the repository contain only a handful of key properties, such as ID and status, needed to identify and open each case in its local application. The full data for a case resides in only one place, its local application database. All processing for that case occurs within its local application, even when that processing is being done by a user within a remote application portal.

Publishing data to the FCMR

The set of properties published to the FCMR, as well as the process of publishing data to the FCMR, is easily customizable. Publishing case data to the FCMR can be configured to occur on a real-time basis, or on a near-real-time basis on a configurable schedule. Publishing to the FCMR can be enabled, disabled, and configured independently for each case type. You can use the FCM landing page to add existing case and administrative data from an application joining a federation.

The federated worklist view

The federated worklist view presents workers with a consolidated list of assignments from the applications in a federation. It also provides a federated Get Next Work gadget and the ability to create new cases of any type within the federation. This view is easily customized to include different data.

The federated case list view

The federated case list view provides a consolidated list of all cases in a federation, including those currently assigned, resolved, etc. This view enables users to see a 360-degree view of all cases across a federation, filtered and sorted by customer, product, location, or any basis desired. This view is easily customized to include different data, filtering, and sorting criteria.

The FCM Landing Page

When first adding an application to a federation, you can easily publish initial data to the FCMR. The FCM landing page enables you to publish data in bulk to the repository. Typically bulk publishing is a one-time operation to initialize a federated class for a new case type. For example, if a new application for handling lost or stolen credit cards is added to a federation, case data from that system can be easily added to the centralized database.

An administrator can choose to publish Work, Administrative, or Assignment data to the FCMR. The FCMR in turn makes the consolidated cases and assignments available to the applications for processing by any authenticated user in the federation.