Case Management

Inspiration

We've all ordered something that never arrives. It sucks. Case managers fix that by managing fallout once an order is taken -- they work through all the exceptions and unique problems to make sure that customer expectations are met and fulfillment needs are ... fulfilled.

What it does

Case Management takes a post from ordering system with key information about the order -- in our demo case for the Hackathon, this is an insurance application. The sales front end can do a simple HTTP post to send application information over the Case Management (CM).

Upon receiving a new case, the CM application will first automatically assign each new case to an agent. There are exception flows to allow a manager to manually assign cases that don't meet the automatic assignment rules. (Unfortunately, due to many unforeseen circumstances, we are not going to be able to demo that manual assignment flow today....but trust us, it is straightforward!)

How we built it

Is there any other way? Why would you build something like this on anything other than LM? Of course you could slap it together in RoR...but then developers would be stuck maintaining it for the rest of their lives. Instead, by using LM, we can put together this beautiful application, but then be able to turn it over to the Case Management managers to maintain and keep up with the changes in their business process and operations.

Challenges we ran into

For demo's, automapper rocks. It's PFM. But for real apps like ours, you probably want more discreet control over the maps and we wound up spending as much time deleting/cleaning maps as anything else. We also would LOVE to have some reference data for things like lookups and making drop-down options much easier. Finally, robust complex array handling would have made a difference -- we did a couple of design changes late in the game because we were planning to use complex arrays and that wasn't viable. (e.g. having an array of followup activities to handle for each case.)

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I suspect it will be the prettiest entrant. Hans is completely to blame. Really I think we are most proud of the LM platform -- it is pretty amazing what you can do, and the way that it demonstrates what we really value at Cignium -- Transparency, Safety, Simplicity, and Integration....it makes it really easy to start building useful business processes and applications.