Case Management in Pega

What is Case Management?

Case Management facilitates casework, guiding caseworkers to the information most relevant to their roles in the case. Caseworkers are able to collaborate, keeping abreast of the work that colleagues have done on cases via personalized event notifications.

Managing cases with Case Management increases efficiency, consistency, and visibility of case processes, which decreases costs and improves quality. Accordingly, Case Management supports the way that caseworkers work with case timelines and relevant context.
Case Management features embrace the dynamic, ad hoc, collaborative, and highly contextual nature of cases. Contextual, rules-based processing ensures that the most appropriate policies and procedures are selected for each case. This increases work automation and routing, in turn reducing the number of manual exceptions. Features include:
Rules-based contextual processing to increase automation

• Document support – add, check out, modify, and collaborate
• The ability to create ad hoc work that adds or changes the expected process based on unanticipated business events or requirements
• A facility that allows caseworkers to incorporate ad hoc work back into the process
• A graphical Case Manager portal that:
  • Provides a large array of tools and context required to efficiently manage numerous cases and their assignments
  • Gives multiple views of caseload levels and work rates in that help caseworkers understand priorities and give managers insight into performance
  • Lets caseworkers share documents and collaborate on related cases and processes
• User forms that enable caseworkers manage multiple case and subcase assignments, add new cases, or start supporting processes

Key features and attributes of Case Management

Three key feature areas of PRPC Case Management are: case design, "design-by-doing" features, and a Case Manager portal. Case design allows users to easily create a rich hierarchy of case types, associated content types and roles. PRPC Case Management also supports the dynamic and ad hoc addition of processes and cases, and "design-by-doing" allows users with permissions to capture best practices by incorporating ad hoc work back into the case design through the use of case templates.

Case Management offers:
 Dynamic & Ad Hoc Case Handling

• • Contextual processing of case is based on type, product, geography, subject, and time frame
  • Ad hoc addition and modification of processes, subcases, tasks and content to the case
• Visible, actionable, and auditable actions
  • Audit trail logs all system and user actions
  • Records the specific policy applied at every step
  • Operator-specific graphical dashboard
  • Extensive standard reports
  • Create custom reports via reporting wizard, exporting to Microsoft Excel for further analysis
• Collaborative Case Management
  • Caseworkers are informed of the status of work that colleagues are doing on cases
  • Multiple caseworkers can work simultaneously on a case without redundancy or conflicts
  • Web 2.0 collaboration is supported through collaboration portals, blogs, and wikis
  • Web access allows third-party users to collaborate on cases
  • Caseworkers in a Federated Case Management system can create and work on cases processed in another PRPC system

Case Lifecycle Management

With the Pega 7 Case Designer, you design your application by describing the stages within a case type, then define the steps or processes that happen in each stage. This provides an easy way to capture objectives in a single view that all parties, from application designers to executives to end users, can use to examine to understand how a particular case type works and progresses.

The user experience

The powerful, intuitive case management user interface provides managers and caseworkers with the features they need to ensure maximum productivity.

 The Case Manager portal provides a dashboard that enables users to:

Create, view, and work on cases

• Display unresolved cases, their subcases, and a case's open assignments
• Display associated content, users, roles, and subjects
• Monitor group status, goals, and deadlines
• Generate work management reports
• User forms provide:
  
  • Access to timelines, content, correspondence, and the status of work done on the case by other parties
  • A navigation tree enabling users to review related subcases and open their assignments
  • An Add Work menu that lets users start processes that support the case and create new cases
  • Navigation links enabling the user to open parent user forms
  • Sections for viewing parties related to the case, and for viewing and adding attachments
  • Access to Pega Pulse social activity stream that facilitates collaboration and conversation among application developers and users

  Cases Explorer

  The Cases Explorer provides a tree hierarchy for constructing and restructuring parent and child case type relationships. Your configuration dictates how cases are created and processes are started. You select a case type to view and define its configuration on a Case Designer landing page.
  

  Case Designer

  The Case Designer is organized into three tabs:
  
  • Details – enables you to define supporting processes, data propagation, service levels, subcase instantiation behavior, email notifications, and other actions.
  • Stages & Processes – displays the stages and steps that define the case type's overall process. You can access the Process Outline view from this tab, which enables you to use Process Modeler to define step processes within the context of a stage.
  • Specifications – allows you to view, create, or update a case type's specifications.

  • Case Management Gallery

    The Case Management Gallery provides a working example of a case management application. You can explore the application's structure and copy its components and rules into your own application for customization. Also included are descriptions and links to more than 60 standard flows, flow actions, and sections that are commonly used in case management designs.

  • Federated Case Management

    The Federated Case Management (FCM) product enables you to connect PRPC applications. Users logged on to a PRPC 6.3+ or PRPC 7.1+ application to create, display, update, and resolve cases in PRPC 6.3+ or PRPC 7.1+ applications hosted on other systems from within their current application portal. Each local application processes and maintains its own cases and data, and publishes data to a centralized database, the Federated Case Management Repository (FCMR.

  • Federated Case Management

    Federated Case Management (FCM) facilities enable users logged onto a PRPC 6.3+ or PRPC 7.1 application to create, display, update and resolve cases in PRPC 6.3+ or PRPC 7.1 applications hosted on other systems, from within their current application portal. Consolidated views of cases and assignments can be viewed from within any application portal in a federation. These views are enabled by the new FCM repository (FCMR), a central database to which applications in a federation publish case and assignment data.
    Sample configurations for FCM include:
    

    1. A front-end call-center application such as Pega Customer Process Manager for Financial Services (CPM-FS), federated with financial service backend systems like Pega Service Case Manager (SCM-FS) and SmartDispute.
        
    2. A distributed application, in which multiple data centers in different locations are running the same PRPC application(s) against different production databases.

     

    Key Features

    • The Federated Case Management Repository (FCMR) contains class tables for federated versions of key PRPC classes, for example, Work-Federated and Assign-Worklist-Federated. Instances of the federated classes serve as lightweight pointers to cases residing in a federation’s local application databases.
    • The federated worklist view presents workers with a consolidated list of assignments from the applications in a federation. It also provides a federated Get Next Work gadget, and the ability to create new cases of any type within the federation. This view is easily customized to include different data.
    • The federated case list view provides a consolidated list of all cases in a federation, including those currently assigned, resolved, etc. This view enables users to see a 360-degree view of all cases across a federation, filtered and sorted by customer, product, location, or any basis desired. This view

  • Important terminology

    Case: Top-level case under which all other elements are nested including subcases, processes, and content/attachments.
    • Case Type: Define the unique processing behavior and content of a case. Most case management applications handle between a few and several case types.
    • Content: Structured or unstructured documents containing information relevant to the case.
    • Dependency: A dependency indicates that different elements of a case have some association or reliance on another case in order to be created or completed.
    • Process: The entity that contains the rules and order of completion for the nested items within a given case.
    • Stage: In a Case Lifecycle Management application, a stage is a first level of organizing the tasks required to complete work associated with a case. For example, you may use checklist to capture the large, and then small, tasks needed to complete a job or project. That checklist is similar to a stage.
    • Step: Represents a task that is completed in a stage. A step can range in scope from a single assignment to a complex, multi-step process.
    • Subcase: A case that is nested under a top-level case. The subcase represents work that must be completed to resolve the case. Subcases may also be parents to other subcases.
    • Subject: The principal focus of a case. There may also be related subjects. Related subjects might be relatives, cohabiters, or related objects such as buildings, products, etc.