Using Advanced Workflow to identify overdue records

Fairly basic question - is it possible to use Advanced Workflow (Sugar BPM) to follow up overdue records which can currently be done easily in Legacy Workflow.

It seems Advanced Workflow is limited to selecting a specific date rather than for example "before today" or a fixed time span.

For example : Expected Close Date is before today or Task is Due in 5 days time ?

Thanks in advance.

Greg Barrass 

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  • Hi Greg Barrass,

    shouldn't a CRM system assist a user to avoid situations like that? As a consultant and system designer I would not like to set something like this up that tells me what is already too late. My thinking would be to set up a mechanic that avoids that any date will become overdue so you need a message like "Warning! Your taks is due in 3 days and you have not even started the work" and then "Escalation: Your task has been escalated to person X because you have not started the task 2 day before it is due"

    Bests

    Björn Canales Pfisterer

    Technical Support Manager

    provalida GmbH

  • Bjorn,

    Good point - I was trying to make the scenario simple.

    Regardless, I can't see how these types of situations can be achieved with Advanced Workflow.

    Regards

    Greg Barrass

  • Hi Greg Barrass,

    ok, so what you need is a time based trigger. Unfortunately SugarBPM can only be triggered by a saved record (on create, one time update or every update) so I don't see a chance to activate a SugarBPM when the time definition is matched.

    Depending on the scenario you can trigger a workflow for each record on create and play with wait events but I guess you need to predefine the waiting times and can't use variables here. This may end in a big amount of open processes which may cause performance issues.

    If anyone else is having an idea to solve this I would be really interested!

    Bests

    Björn Canales Pfisterer

    Technical Support Manager

    provalida GmbH

  • Bjorn,

    Thanks for the confirmation.

    I am surprised (as I am sure you are) that this is not yet in Sugar BPM given it is a fundamental part of "legacy" workflow and Sugar BPM in its various iterations has been available for at least 18 months that I am aware of. 

    I will post this up in the appropriate area for people to vote on for SugarCRM to address. It is a major barrier to migrating to Sugar BPM.

    Regards

    Greg Barrass

  • Hi Greg,

    I agree but technically there is a huge difference between both scenarios. A saved record is a single event to one record within the database and easy to fetch but on tracking time events you need an absolutely different technical aproach.

    First of all you need to define a "tick" which can be every milisecond, minute, second or whatever. Then you need the ability to check the database for processes on each "tick" including all records that have the current timestamp in any field that would/could be a trigger. You can imagine what a huge impact this can have to the database / server performance especially on large databases and or large amount of time based processes.

    I hope this rough explaination helps to understand why SugarCRM is not "simply" adding this feature to SugarBPM :-)

    Bests

    Björn Canales Pfisterer

    Technical Support Manager

    provalida GmbH

Reply
  • Hi Greg,

    I agree but technically there is a huge difference between both scenarios. A saved record is a single event to one record within the database and easy to fetch but on tracking time events you need an absolutely different technical aproach.

    First of all you need to define a "tick" which can be every milisecond, minute, second or whatever. Then you need the ability to check the database for processes on each "tick" including all records that have the current timestamp in any field that would/could be a trigger. You can imagine what a huge impact this can have to the database / server performance especially on large databases and or large amount of time based processes.

    I hope this rough explaination helps to understand why SugarCRM is not "simply" adding this feature to SugarBPM :-)

    Bests

    Björn Canales Pfisterer

    Technical Support Manager

    provalida GmbH

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