Getting Tasks to the Right Participants, Part 1

Recently, I was working with a client to implement a managed Loan Origination Process using Lombardi’s Teamworks BPM suite.

As with any real-world process, there were a few interesting “gotchas”, but on the whole it was a pretty standard process that many of you would easily recognize.

In this case, modeling the Loan Origination Process using BPMN diagrams was fairly straight-forward, but when we got to the point of implementing Task Assignment and Routing things got interesting. Let me very loosely paraphrase some roughly similar Task Routing requirements (that I made up for this blog entry):

“When a Loan Application comes in, make the application available to all of our Credit Officers who have sufficient Lending Authority to process the loan, and who haven’t already met their quota of applications for the week. Of course if everybody has already met their quotas for the week, then let everyone have an opportunity to work on the new application.

One more thing, only a few of our Credit Officers can approve loans over $100,000, so don’t route low value loans to them unless they are the only available credit officers.

And don’t let anyone claim more than 3 applications at a time. Our Credit Officers are compensated for the number of loans that they process, and some of them will claim all the applications that they can in hopes of earning more money.”

These Task Assignment/Routing requirements are kind of involved, but they make sense in the real-world. If you can’t handle real-world problems in your managed business process then you aren’t going to make many business people happy. So how do you satisfy complex Task Routing/Assignment requirements like this?

There are three key elements to any business process:

1. The steps and flow of the process
2. The data the process generates and consumes
3. The participants who perform the process

Task Routing itself deals with the Process Participants: How do you know who the right participants are and how do you assign tasks and route information to them?

Ed.: Next, I’ll talk about more about Task Routing, and getting the right tasks to show up on the right user’s task list at the right time.

Questions? Leave us a comment below!