Watch our video to learn how to set up Service Level Agreements in ABBYY FlexiCapture and the various elements involved in this process. Some of these elements include: queues, task counts, workflows, and time limits.
Hello. Today I’d like to discuss with you setting up service level agreements or what we refer to as SLAs within ABBYY FlexiCapture. Now the concept of an SLA in workflow management is that when we go into a queue, like what you see on my screen, certain items that have a higher priority or a higher SLA, or have an SLA that is close to even expiring would be worked prior to other traditional documents or documents with lower SLAs. And there’s a couple of things when we enable SLAs that happen to the interface of the product. First off, you get a “Process Warning Task Count” and an “Overdue Task Count”. The software, as items come close to approaching their SLA mark, they will be notified as a warning to an end user. And that’s what this count represents. And once a document or a batch reaches past the SLA amount, then we consider that an overdue document or batch. And hence why we call that an “Overdue Task Count”.
Now, at any point you can right click and explore the queue. And you can see here that I now have certain batches that have expiration dates on them and a status of expired. As they get closer to approaching an SLA, they may have different statuses of a warning status, but as they expire, the status is respectively updated. Now the concept is that once I get a task as an end user, so if I push my “Get Task” button, what I will do is I will receive a batch that has either an expired SLA or an SLA that is close to getting expired. So it controls really the round-robin approach of the queue. It gives us the ability to kind of reprioritize those SLA documents to a higher priority.
Now, in order to set this up, we go into our ABBYY FlexiCapture Project Setup Station, and we will update the workflow. When we get into a workflow, just make sure you remember that batch types have their own workflows. And what you’re currently looking at is my default workflow for the project. So you may need to enable this at a couple of different spots depending on your architecture of your project. But what I’ve done here is I’ve enabled processing time limits for each batch. And then I have now this button “Set Time Limit” that is available to us. When we click that button, you can see, we have certain settings of the SLA. We can tell the software to use a time limit, whether it be minutes, hours, or days. And to also issue a warning as documents get closer to reaching that SLA limit, we may want the software to trigger an automatic warning, or we may want to control that on our own by setting a static value for this warning.
The other option that we have then is the availability to set a time limit with a script, and this will open up our scripting engine within the solution. The interesting part about is that we can accommodate a lot of different business scenarios. So we can look up information in databases. We can call web services. We can set time limits based on business hours and maybe not just, you know, server time hours. So a lot of control that we get when we set this time limit with a script, but nonetheless, don’t forget that concept of this service level agreement or SLA is to change the priority of tasks or batches within the solution. Thank you so much for watching this video. If you have any questions, please reach out to us.