Understanding and complying with case management best practices
As you work through your business process, you might need specific information or data formats to reach your business goal. Pega Platform offers tools that you can use to ensure that the work that users perform in your application aligns with compliance and regulatory requirements that you set for your case types.
You can apply the following best practices to ensure that your case types follow rules and policies that you define for your work:
Building a case life cycle
To provide users with a series of logically ordered steps towards their business goal, define a case life cycle that orders actions into a sequence. For example, in an application for reviewing job candidates, you can define a sequence in which a hiring manager needs to approve a candidate before an HR worker starts an onboarding process for the candidate. Although with Pega Platform you can create flexible applications and respond to dynamically changing circumstances in an agile way, you can also define which actions are necessary to resolve a business process. As a result, you ensure that case workers have enough data to resolve a case in any scenario, and that your work meets all the regulations specific to your organization.
For more information, see Case life cycle elements.
Eliminating duplicate cases
To save time and maintain the good quality of processing, you can search for and then eliminate duplicate cases. As a result, you ensure that every case is unique, and you increase the chances of reaching a successful resolution. You can define conditions that immediately evaluate whether a new case is a duplicate. For example, you can ensure that a customer can create only one loan request for a certain amount of money before resolving a previous request. In this way, you avoid unnecessary processing and maximize the probability of meeting your customer's business objectives.For more information, see Finding duplicate cases.
Validating case data
To avoid errors and speed up case resolution, assist users when they provide data for cases. For example, when a user enters a phone number, an application checks whether the number includes the correct number of digits and no special characters, so that a customer service representative (CSR) can contact the customer when required. You can create validation conditions that meet your unique business requirements and provide error messages so that users can quickly locate the problem and provide their data in the correct format.For more information, see Validating case data and Validating field values on a form.
Auditing case data
To maintain case compliance and follow progress, you can conveniently track changes that users make in cases. For example, you can check how and when a user changes a shipping address in a purchase order case, so that their parcel of purchased items reaches the correct place. You can track changes to specific fields, as well as view audit messages that users submit upon performing a change.
For more information, see Enabling field-level auditing.
Archiving case data
To save on your database costs and comply with regulatory requirements at the same time, create an archival policy for your cases. You can archive inactive cases and remove them from the database to a secondary storage. For any audit purposes, you can still search for and view the inactive cases. For example, you can archive any case that was resolved more than a year ago. If you need to audit the case, for example because a customer files a complaint, you can automatically access the case from your secondary storage.
For more information, see Improving performance by archiving cases.
Providing case access
To ensure that users interact with relevant case data only, you can configure case access settings. By exposing only applicable actions and information to users, you deliver an application that is flexible and easy to follow at the same time. You also protect confidential data from random users and ensure that only appropriate users can perform certain actions. For example, to review loan requests in an application, only managers might have an option to approve or reject a request. In a different scenario, sales representatives can access the details of only their own sales opportunities.
For more information, see Securing case access.