I formerly worked for a company that had a complicated, multi-steps approval process. One of the issues was that the process would frequently come to a halt at some point, and the approver would postpone their approval for days, if not weeks. The causes for the delay can vary, but the solution we implemented was pretty straightforward: we establish deadlines for each stage of the approval process, warn the approver several hours beforehand with email reminder, and if he does not approve, send him and his direct manager another reminder.
Amazingly, the alerts has dramatically reduced the approval times.
It appears that we frequently need due dates and phases in our process (breaking a complex task into steps, sounds familiar?), and occasionally we need enforcement actions to remind us of our tasks. The milestone concept and their functionalities include all of this.
The application Customized Timeline Process was designed exactly for that kind of tasks. Building processes per the organization need with few button clicks.
The application support setting milestone steps for any data type in the system (standard/custom) as well as automation actions for enforcing the times. In addition, the app provides reports to analyze the results and identify where there is room for improved performance.
As an example lets look at a milestone process on the Account.
I set first step as: Set Required fields, which as the name indicate it require to fill some essentials data on the account.
Per the configuration the user should fill the fields Rating, Industry and Website in order to complete this step and it should be done within 1 day.
In addition, I set an alert action to be sent to the account manager 1 hour before the due date.
Continue with step 2: Create First Opportunity (expected to be done within 3 days)
And later Step 3 and 4: Schedule a Demo Meeting and Close the Opportunity, will eventually the result with the following configuration:
After activating the process, any time new account will be created the application will automatically generate its related steps, automatically complete each step and execute the relate actions, as can be seen in the short video
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