Brittany,
The most common approach is to capture the date (and optionally time) the current state has changed. The difference between this date and the current date indicates how long the record has been sitting at this state. Some implementations update a "days since" type of attribute so that a simple search can be performed to identify the ones that have been at that state for a specified number of days or longer. The "days since" attribute would be updated by a background process on a nightly basis. In some cases, a repository might have sets of attributes that are to be enriched/populated by different groups. The same technique is used for multiple sets with separate dates/days since fields (one for each group). This approach is useful when the record is "in workflow" but there isn't an active work item that reflects its current state.
If the record is "in workflow" and sitting at a manual activity, then another option is to use the expiration settings in the manual activity to advance the work item if there is no activity. This can be used to take action if there was no user-action by a prescribed amount of a time. What follows the expiration could be some escalation or even incrementing of a count (such as the number of days waiting) along with a conditional check to take action after some number of those intervals.
If it's necessary/desired to expose the "days since", it is best to be stored as an attribute in the record, whether it's calculated by export/import nightly update or workflow expiration update.
The Change Notification functionality requires there to be a change in order for action to be taken. In the scenario you describe, there is likely no action, so it's probably not going to be a good fit for tracking the "days since" type information.
-Brian
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Brian Zupke | Senior Technical Support Engineer
Winshuttle North America | 9099009179
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Original Message:
Sent: 06-22-2021 10:05
From: Brittany Adams
Subject: Audits and Attribute Tracking
Hello,
My team and I are currently trying to implement a way to track items that haven't moved within workflow over an 'X' amount of days. We first identified all of the items that are still in workflow, and within that group we want to identify all of the items that over the 'X' amount of days have had no progress made to the item. We have tried using an advanced search but we can't pinpoint how to report of items that haven't moved. We also were thinking about a change notification, with these scenarios, our thought process is..If we can track when an item DOES change, how can we track when an item DOESN'T change?
Has anyone else experienced this type of scenario or have any thoughts on this?
Thank you,
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Brittany Adams | Data Management Steward
DAS Companies | 7176122729
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