Escalation

The escalation period specifies the period within which an assigned party must do an activity before it is designated to a specified escalation participant.

Escalation is the period in which the participant must process approvals, requests for information, work orders, compliance alerts, and recertifications. If the participant does not complete the activity by the escalation date, the activity is sent to the escalation participant and the escalation period restarts. Activity is terminated if none of the participants act on it. Activity is sent to the system administrator only if participant resolution fails.

Escalation behavior is controlled through properties on approval, RFI, or work order nodes. The following properties affect escalation behavior:

  • Skip Escalation
  • No Timeout Action
  • Complete on Timeout

The following figure shows a flow diagram that illustrates how each property affects the process.

Flow diagram of the escalation process and its interaction with workflow activity properties

The following list describes escalation process that is pictured in the diagram.

  1. Request arrives
    • If a participant handles the request by accepting it or rejecting it, the activity ends in the corresponding state.
    • If the request times out, the system checks the Skip Escalation property.
  2. Check for skipping escalation.
    • If Skip Escalation is set, the activity continues and checks the No Timeout Action property.
    • If Skip Escalation is not set, the systems checks for the escalation participant. If it can identify the configured escalation participant, the activity is put into PENDING state for the escalation participant to handle. If no escalation participant is configured for the activity or the check for the escalation participant fails, the activity ends with state TERMINATED/FAILED.
  3. Check for timeout action. If Skip Escalation is set or the activity times out of the PENDING state for escalation, the system checks the No Timeout Action property.
    • If FALSE, the system proceeds and checks the Complete On Timeout property.
    • If TRUE, the activity is placed in PENDING state. A participant can approve or reject the request.
  4. Check for what to do when the activity times out.
    • If Complete On Timeout is set (TRUE), the postscript for the activity runs and the activity state is set to COMPLETED/TIMEOUT.
    • If Complete On Timeout is not set (FALSE), the system sends a timeout notification and the activity state is set to TERMINATED/FAILED.