Business Objective Overview - Case Management

Case Management systems all have similar activities. There is some instantiating event such as an email, a phone call, a request for information. That event has to be managed by an automated process that monitors the case through assignment, notification and ultimately closure. In the end, that information needs to be archived so it can be easily accessed, re-used or made available for self service. Of course, these processes need visibility through an easy to navigate dashboard with graphs, at a glance key performance indicators and other visual cues.

Every company and government agency can relate to the flood of "cases" hitting various departments - MIS, legal, HR, accounting, engineering, education, etc. Whether these queries come from inside executives, outside constituents, or even Capitol Hill, the same problems persist:

• Answers can never be produced fast enough
• Bottlenecks in the process are difficult to identify and remove
• Subject matter experts are difficult to locate and engage
• It's hard to tell whether process improvements are making a difference
• Dozens of legacy ECM/BPM products offer to fix the problem given:
  • Months or years to construct a custom solution
  • Hundreds of thousands of dollars in license/programming costs
  • A team of skilled consultants to maintain the solution

Solutions Brief - Case Management

A large technology company was experiencing a great demand for answers to legal and corporate affairs inquiries from employees using their Intranet. The legal and corporate affairs site on the Intranet was well organized, had lots and lots of content, and provided a prominently placed individualized email link to the logged in employee's legal representative. If an employee couldn't find what they were looking for, they just needed to click the email link to send an inquiry to their representative. The problem was that there was no process in place to track the emails, nor was there a central place to store answers to previously asked questions. The legal representatives spent a lot of time answering a wide variety of questions - sometimes again and again. This gets pretty expensive since legal staffs are typically highly compensated employees. Perhaps the larger problem was that employees had no way to know if their question was received and when to expect an answer. Sometimes their question fell through the cracks.

Three key success factors of the solution were to (1) Provide a central knowledge repository so employees could check to see if their inquiry has already been answered, (2) Assign inquiries to legal staff based on what the inquiry was about rather than who it came from, and (3) Track the inquiries so the company can better plan for resources needed to address higher loads in certain subject areas.

Using the Bamboo Knowledge Base Solution Accelerator, a Knowledge Base was quickly deployed. Out of the box, it provides a repository for articles stored by category. Employees can browse or search for articles using the same tools they use to search the rest of the site. Once found, they can rate articles and provide comments, so the content can be continuously improved. Because the Knowledge Base tracks how many times each article has been viewed, users can browse through popular articles first, if desired. When an employee cannot find needed information, he/she submits a question.

The Knowledge Base Solution was extended using the WF Conductor product to automatically route questions submitted by employees to the appropriate subject matter experts (SMEs). A WF Conductor workflow is also used to escalate questions when necessary. Using the Alert Plus Web Part, reminder alert emails are sent to the SMEs when a question is assigned and also if it is not answered within 2 days. Thank you emails are also sent to employees, acknowledging the receipt of their question and providing some guidance as to when they can expect an answer.

Finally, a dashboard showing status charts for unanswered questions, the disposition of completed questions, and a list of the outstanding questions helps the management team ensure that the Knowledge Base is continuing to meet the needs of the employees, mature, and minimize redundant tasks for high dollar resources (i.e., the legal staff).