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Monday, June 23, 2014

Update Order Management Process of Annual Service Agreement

There are plenty of service agreements that are for period of monthly or annual. Contract of insurance, newspaper subscription contract, contract for communication line, contracts with lawyers and tax accountants, contract of Cloud services...

Cases are not rare in the contract of this kind, that require procedures not only on "new contract", but also on "update". On the services for general consumers, many of them are in the pattern of "automatic new contract × automatic update". But on services for enterprises, there are some cases that proposing additional options, or proposing longer period than the previous, or required explanation of the contents of the service over again.
That is the moment that a Sales staff to play the active part, so it should be performed smoothly, efficiently, without mistake nor leakage. And that is for nobody else but the customers.

The following Workflow definition is a Business process for centrally management of procedures of newly contract and contract updating, contract modification of the halfway, together with managing to invoicing / payment confirmation. I could have held a 'workshop seminar for two hours' just to explain this single flow diagram, but roughly speaking, the flow is that 'Sales' inputs the Orders and 'Management division' issues invoices.

[Procedures for Service Start/Extension/Change (Order-Billing)]

[Procedures for Service Start/Extension/Change (Order-Billing): '1. New.' screen



[Data list screen]

[Invoice PDF sample]



This Workflow definition has four Starting points. Each of them is Order reporting by a Sales representative.
  • 1. New. Order of new contract
  • 1. Extend. Extension of term of existing contract (Including auto-update)
  • 1. Change. Content change of existing contract
  • 1. other. Order that does not contain the main service

Of course, you may combine them into a single Step of "registration of the order content". That is, there will be no problem at all for the contents of the contract if the data were stored as an attribute of "Process Data".

However, it is necessary to seriously consider 'what do you want to visualized', according to the business contents and corporate culture. In this example, the contents of the Orders are 'visualized' at the level of Process Diagram. That is, the number of applications and stagnating situation of the "new contract" will be able to be checked (monitoring) easily at any time.

By the way, "multiple starting points" also would have a meaning other than the point of view of monitoring.
That is, in many cases of Order reporting work, Order data of the past would be copied to be input (re-use Start). But in this case, the data items to be reused will be different in the four patterns. If it is a simple 'Extension of term of existing contracts', the "Contents of the contract" should be copied. But if it is 'Content change of existing contract', the "Contents of the contract" should not be copied.
If you want to automatically control the data items to be copied, "programming knowledge" (JavaScript) becomes absolutely necessary, but at first, it is important to experience firsthand, what kind of mistake occurs in which Start pattern, by separating the Steps. Eventually, it will lead to reducing the comments like, "Oh, I'm sorry, I simply copied the contract of the last time", even a little.


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