help creating BP to email contact on cases set to "Customer" for 14 days

Question

Hi all, 
 When we reply to a customer we set the case status to "Customer". I want to create a BP that 
 - checks if a case has been at customer for 14 days 
 - sends an email to the primary contact saying "hey, if we don't hear back in 7 days, we will close this case" 
 - closes the case if it is still at customer after those last 7 days 
 I'm struggling with the entire thing. If a case goes to customer, and I start the timer, then the person replies (which automatically changes the status to "Pending not new"), I'd need the counter to start over. And if the initial 14 days pass, and then the person replies, I don't want the case to be closed after the next 7 days. 
 Help?

Elisabeth Hunt · Accepted Answer

Hi Elisabeth , 
 The best way to handle these 'if-then-else' scenarios in SugarBPM is with event-based gateways. An event-based gateway allows you to define 2 or more scenarios at an inflection point of your process and which ever scenario happens first is the path the process will take. Based on your description, the process should look something like this: 
 
 With each event-based gateway, they are either waiting for the specific period of inactivity to expire or for any status change on the case (to cover for scenarios where an agent manually updates the case status, the customer replies, etc.). If the status changes while it is waiting for the wait timer expiration, then the process immediately ends. Then if the case later returns to a 'Customer' status, it kicks off a new process from the beginning. 
 You could design this process to be open from the time it first enters a 'Customer' status until its eventual closure, but I recommend keeping processes with wait timers and receive message events as succinct as possible. These types of processes can add overhead processing time on the backend when there are a large number of open processes to parse. 
 I hope this helps! 
 Chris