Creating or adapting standard activities

You can create new standard activities (task, appointment, phone call) or adapt existing ones here. With stan­dard activities, you specify, e.g., the Responsibility right from the start. Thus, templates or blank documents for creating reports of cases and projects, contact reports or similar things can also be provided together with standard activities. To be able to use standard activities in a process, they must be assigned to a Process status.

1. Select the corresponding process.
2. Check which statuses have been created for the process. You can customize or add standard activi­ties only for these statuses.
3. Choose the Process status in the overview tree for which you would like to create or edit activities.
4. Expand the process status in the overview tree to display the assigned activities. Expand the respec­tive activity category if necessary.
5. Click one of the sub dialog functions, Task, Appointment or Phone call, in the function bar if you want to create a new activity for the selected status and edit the new standard activity.
6. Select an existing activity (icon) and switch to the tab to the right (Standard- ...) if you want to edit an existing standard activity.
7. Enter all necessary defaults of the activity (e.g., task) which then count as the default for the standard activity. This is the only way to change the defaults or delete the standard activity.
8. Usually, the user who creates the record that triggers a standard activity is also the person Responsible for this standard activity. You can, however, specify a Responsible or a Role always responsible for this specific standard activity. The role of a user is determined through the contact relation of a case or contact. If a Responsible and also a Role is entered in the standard activity, the role is checked first and fixed. Only if no role contact is found, will the responsible person receive the activity.
9. Save all changes.
10. You can assign several activities to a single process status.
11. If necessary, check whether the Start offset (h) and the Duration are sufficient for the sales procedures in your company.
12. Save the process definition.

The Start offset and Duration are default values for the time necessary to process a standard activity, until it escalates by itself. This time can of course be adjusted later in the activity itself. The Start offset in the process determines the time between the creation of an activity and the moment when it begins. This means that the beginning of the activity is delayed for the specified time value.

If you don’t enter a value for Start offset, the standard activity begins immediately when it is created. In standard activities that take a certain amount of time, the Duration, i.e., the period until the activity automatically esca­lates is added as well. This influences the period from the beginning to the deadline of the activity. If no duration is set, the standard activity escalates immediately at its beginning (for example, when the quote is created).

If standard activities are defined at a process, then every time a record is created in the context of this process, standard activities are automatically created as well. If needed, you can switch off this feature by means of the PSA_CPY_ACT_OPR_STD variable (default = y).

The start offset and duration of standard activities are mostly based on the working hours in the company.

The values that determine the working hours of the staff members or company can be defined in environ­ment variables (start offset and dura­tion) and are taken account of when standard activities are created.

It can be necessary for different standard activities to refer the Start offset not only to the beginning of the activity, but also to date fields of the “quote” sales case  (parent object of the standard activity), e.g., quote period or period of commitment. These reference fields can be specified in the Start off­set field.

If you enter a negative value (-XX, 00), the moment of the creation of a standard activity is retrospec­tively deferred. Relating to a start offset field, a corresponding task could be created, for example for the person responsible for the case, five days before the period of commitment of the quotes expires.

The well-known “fixed” flag of activities is also writable on the process in all three standard activity forms (default = ON). By deactivating it, the administrator can allow, for example, a delegated con­tact to adjust the due date already in the process definition.