Designing your case management solution

To design a case management solution, identify what user tasks are needed to accomplish the main user goal. Decide what business level tasks and steps you need, and then group those tasks and steps into a case. As you identify the content needed to complete those steps, decide who will work on the content and what does or does not need to happen to complete it.

One approach to designing a solution is to first identify the types of documents that people in your organization need to complete for some task. For example, to resolve a credit card dispute claim, you might need a dispute form and customer to complete the form and a service representative to review that form. Next, you might need to initiate a fraud investigation if circumstances warrant such a task. In that case, you might need a fraud investigator to review the claim.

Therefore, for a credit card dispute case, the solution must include these artifacts:

Dispute form
Fraud investigation form

Your solution must also include these roles:

Customer
Customer service representative
Fraud investigator

The following diagram shows the steps you might take when you try to identify the artifacts that you will need for a solution.

You can use Case Manager Builder to help you think through the various document classes, roles, case types, tasks, and so on that you need for a specific solution.

Flow diagram that shows
the path a business analyst might go through when designing and creating
a solution.

A solution is a set of related business problems (or case types). For example, if you are designing a solution for the bank industry for a credit card dispute claim, you might first decide what case types are needed. An example of a credit card dispute case type is a processing a claim. For this case type, a customer claim for a credit card dispute is reported and processed.

For every business problem that you are trying to solve (case type), you have physical assets or documents (document classes) that you work with to complete the case, people who work those documents (roles), and tasks that need to be completed to close the case. Properties help to define the details of the case types, document classes, roles, and tasks.

A process describes how case workers must complete a task, but a task describes what needs to be done and why. For every task, steps can be completed by the system or by the case worker. Tasks can be run in parallel, they can be chained together, or they can even be skipped.

You can define a task process map by using Step Designer in Case Manager Builder or by using Process Designer, which is integrated into Case Manager Builder at both the solution and task level. You can create a Case Manager Builder process definition by using the Step Designer or an external process from IBM® Case Foundation or IBM Business Process Manager. You can modify workflow processes that are created for a task in the Case Manager Builder Step Designer in the FileNet® P8 Process Designer. External process tasks are created as reused tasks in the Case Manager Builder and should be implemented by using FileNet P8 Process Designer or Integration Designer.

Tasks can be required or optional, and you can set the tasks to start automatically or manually by a case worker. A case is completed when all required and currently running tasks are completed. In addition, you can group tasks so that they are mutually exclusive and only one task in the group can be completed or all-inclusive and all tasks in that group must be completed. You can also group tasks inside of a container task.

You can also associate business rules with your solution. Organizations might have rules for business operations, such as for pricing calculations, eligibility checks, validations, underwriting, and fraud detection. In your solution, you can create business rules that determine process routing or update case properties. In conjunction with other IBM Case Manager capabilities, business rules can be used in the following ways:

Intelligently assign priority to cases or assign case workers to tasks
Automatically create and assign tasks
Trigger fully automated actions that are based on external events, completion of other case tasks, or expiration of task deadlines
Apply rules to the key facts and information, and guide the responses that are based on that information
Simplify certain tasks by automating the decision logic
Increase consistency by using decision rules across similar cases

You can also design your solution in other ways:

Decide what the case worker needs to do to complete his or her job and what fields are needed in the Case Manager Client.
Evaluate the use case flow and extract the solution assets from it.

As you become familiar with designing solutions, you can identify the roles, document classes, and properties that can be used in more than one case type.

Tip: When multiple business analysts are collaboratively designing a solution, inform other users before you delete solution objects such as case types. If you delete a case type and commit the changes while another user is editing that case type, errors will be returned when that user saves and deploys the solution.

When you design and create a solution, you must decide what the solution locale is. The solution locale refers to the locale of display names, such as case properties, case types, tasks, and other solution artifacts that you create with Case Manager Builder. When you deploy the solution to a target environment for the first time, you must deploy the solution under the same locale to ensure that the display names are preserved.