Understanding Case Management

Step into the world of Case Management and find out how it can help you manage your company’s processes.

Imagine a whole room of filing cabinets, each one holding masses of information about everything that is going on in your business.

A single Case, quite simply, contains a list of information, similar to what you would find in a traditional filing cabinet within a single paper file.

A Case can represent anything. A person, customer or staff member, an organisation or company, a deal, an order, an invoice, a service request, an asset, a training document or a knowledge item – the list is endless. Each Case will store data relevant to its definition. For example, an invoice will store a total amount or a person will store an e-mail address and generally each Case will have a unique reference attached to it.

Take the example of a customer calling you to find out about an invoice in relation to the deal that was agreed last week. You then head to the room filled with the filing cabinets and find the customer file to then find the deal reference, then you have to go to another cabinet to find the deal which contains the invoice reference then go to another to find the invoice relating to the deal (and that’s assuming everything has been filed correctly!).

Managing these filing cabinets of Cases using paper or spreadsheets would quickly become a management and administration nightmare.

Having electronic versions of these Case files allows you to eliminate these issues and do much more.

THE MAGIC WAND

Think back to that room full of filing cabinets, but this time you have a magic wand in your hand. No, this isn’t the world of Harry Potter, it’s the world of Case Management.

The magic wand will allow you to do whatever you want with your Cases and help you to define a process to manage their flow through your organisation from inception to completion to archiving.

With just a wave of your wand you can:

  • Find a Case instantly without having to trawl through a cabinet
  • Re-order your Cases by priority or date in a flash
  • Assign Cases to different members of staff to process based on the data they contain
  • Apply a timer to a Case to ensure that it is handled within a suitable timeframe
  • View a report on how many Cases have been Completed in the last 5 days
  • Link Cases together with ease
  • Upload another document to the Case file whether that be an image, PDF or a text document (no need for staplers here)
  • Store or start an e-mail conversation or notes with the case so that you can easily retrieve the last conversation
  • View a detailed audit trail of who opened the file, who updated the data and who did what in relation to the Case or Cases
  • Provide a set of keys to unlock the filing cabinets via Permissions
  • Automatically display information on the Case file that has been pulled from a 3rd party tool

CASE MANAGEMENT

In the software world, Case Management is a term used to describe a method of defining and collecting data supplemented with managing the downstream processes to achieve business outcomes.

Case Management provides the ability to process and track the progress of Cases. It allows you to define and run your end to end processes without the need for complex process modelling tools or notations.

Each process may involve surfacing common tasks and different stages of the Case (checklists or tasks to automatically send an e-mail) and provides a platform for defining new tasks on-the-fly.

To this end, processes can grow and evolve over time with the definition of the Case changing day to day. By tracking who did what and when, you are able to identify bottlenecks and make improvements to the process. You will also be able to identify efficiencies based upon how previous Cases have been executed and choose to apply these efficiencies to the next case that is processed.

This ability to learn and quickly evolve moves the definition of Case Management further into the world of Advanced Case Management, often referred to as Adaptive Case Management or Dynamic Case Management.

A Case Management platform will allow you to manage and track interactions from social media, e-mail or telephony channels and integrate data from other systems. This gives you a 360 degree view of what is happening and allows you to provide the best and most efficient service to your Customers.

Next time you are looking for the best way to run your business processes using software solutions, think of the filing cabinets and consider the world of Case Management.