Many work organizations require tracking of a document or a case from the point that it enters the system to the point when its processing is finished. There are many situations where the electronic control of such work process can be beneficial. It is often useful to know what phase a document is currently in, which person has it, how much time each person spent doing its part of processing, etc.

Initial situation:
Our client's workflow involved processing of medical claims. Every claim required a separate action from 7-8 different people. Most of the actions were sequential, one had to be done before the other.

System description:
Case Tracker is a web-based application, which records every action done on a particular case. A logic is similar to that of a bug-tracking system - action can't be deleted. It can be changed, but the modification is logged into a separate entry. Thus, all the case history is transparent and can't be faked.

 

Additionaly, every group of workers is assigned the appropriate role and the application forces the appropriate sequence of actions. Every worker not only logs its action and the time spent, but also needs to assign the case to the next user in the work flow, which ensures that it is known at every time who has the case and who is potentially delaying its processing.

 

Our client also had situations, where some cases had a processing deadline. Thus, an automated email notification sub-system is developed. It sends several different levels of alerts, so our client can produce a timely response to these unpleasant delay situations.

 

At first, one might think that this is all there is to it, but the recording of every action's time introduces many possibilities for the analisys of the whole work flow. It's easy to produce rich statistical reports, which can display total time spent on every case, a group of cases, etc. All this provides not only a global view of every worker's effort, but also a further insight on how the whole process can be improved. It's also possible to fine tune the process specifics - for example, one group of cases may be more important than the other, so one can see how much is the important group delayed, and speed up its processing.

 

Technical details:
Case tracker application is developed using the Microsoft .NET framework 1.1 and related development tools (VS.NET 2003 & C#), and is running on MS Windows 2003 server and SQL Server 2000. The reports are developed using ActiveReports component.