Scenario
The day to day operation of a supply chain process involves receiving purchase orders and supplying the requested goods.
When P.O.s are not getting shipped out by the cut-off date it becomes necessary to gather additional human resources onto this order in order to help complete it.
In such a scenario one of the challenges is actually announcing the escalated task to the additional human resources? They typically carry around mobile PDA's with them, and only check the work items in their Workspace once or twice daily. Therefore scheduling a group human task in LiveCycle may not get started until the next day.
One solution would be if we could get the overdue process to email the required workers an iCalendar file. The iCalendar file would contain the data about where, when and why they were needed to provide help, and would integrate into the Calendar application on their respective PDAs.
iCalendar is a standard (RFC 2445) for calendar data exchange.
So how do we encode the process and how could we generate an iCalendar file? Read on:
The Process
So the general idea in this process is to attach a Task Deadline Timer event to the user task.
Should the user-task "Prepare Order for Delivery" be completed in a timely manner, an invoice will be sent to the customer. However, should the user task take too long; the timeout will trigger the process to follow the path labeled "Critically Late". In this case a meeting is created using the Create Meeting Solution Component, which produces an iCalendar file. This file, when emailed, can update each recipient's personal schedules. For example if the recipients use Outlook, Google Calendar, iCal etc. it updates their personal organizers.
A copy of this process can be downloaded from EstablishMeeting.
If you install it make sure that you:
- to set the "to: address" of "Email Meeting Details" to be your own email address so that you can receive the emailed iCalendar file.
- add Taskmanager endpoint to process "EstablishMeeting".
- Set security setting on the endpoint such that "All principals in Sample Organisation, FinanceCorp" are in the list of users who can start the process.
A license for the "Create Meeting" Solution Component is available from Avoka Technologies.
