Introduction

Casewhere is a case management, process standardization, and workflow automation system.

Casewhere makes it possible to create seamlessly integrated processes that tie together applications, internal and external actors, and data stores.

Casewhere differs in its approach to other similar systems in that it does its best to avoid becoming another database within a company. When possible, Casewhere will integrate with other systems rather than try to replace them. This is made possible based on its extremely open architecture where it would rather save and collect data real time from e.g. a company’s Active Directory, Databases, Email Servers, and Web Services than try to be an alternative to them.

This approach to solving and supporting company processes has a lot of advantages to less open case management and workflow tools as for example:

• Quick implementation time
• Easy integration into a company (low organizational resistance)
• Lower costs
• Easier maintenance (less need for data synchronization)

Why choose Casewhere?

Most organizations have a lot of well functioning systems that all take care of vital parts of the company’s business, like Finance systems, HR systems, CRM system, logistics systems, online sales applications, and so on. The problem with many of these systems is, that they function in silos. Some of them may well share data, but most of them will not trigger a reaction based on what happens in other systems. I.e. systems typically operate in functional silos and typically a lot of manual work needs to be delegated to move “cases” along. Let us look at a couple of examples to clearly understand what type of “gaps” that Casewhere is made to bridge.

• When a new employee is hired by an interviewer the recruitment system will typically not inform the HR system to send a contract, it will not set up a computer request for the IT department, it will not automatically send a welcome letter, it will not automatically inform the colleagues that this person is starting, it will not automatically set up authentication and authorization rights for the company’s systems, it will not automatically make sure to ask the new employee of prerequisite information that needs to be collected before the employee starts, it will not automatically send information to the social and medical insurance relations, it will not automatically generate an email for the new employee, and so forth.
• When a customer contacts the support department with an issue, the CRM system may well take care of going through the necessary support processes, but it will not update the production systems to increase production of a broken item, it will not automatically inform the Key Account Manager, it will not set a deadline for the delivery of a spare part with the shipping department, it will not automatically send an email after shipping was done to the customer to see if everything went well, and so forth.

Casewhere can close these gaps while still allowing the existing systems to be used in the same way as they always have. Due to its open architecture it can trigger based on what happens in one system and push data into other systems, interact by email and online forms, take decisions based on configured logic, and so much more.

Casewhere is all about processes. First step in implementing Casewhere is identifying the company process that needs to be supported. Every time that a process needs to be ‘run’ we instantiate a Case. A Case is an abstract entity that can hold information on collected data, status, communication history, involved people, deadlines, progress, and anything else that we find is important information in regards to administering what goes on for one specific instance in a process. A Process in Casewhere is a set of rules that govern the way that a Case is administered. A Process is built up of a number of Workflow Definitions. Workflow Definitions are the rules that govern the order in which different sub-processes need to be carried out. Workflow Definitions instantiate Workflows. Workflow Definitions can be split into an even lower entity called Workflow Step Definitions, which instantiate Workflow Steps. Finally Workflow Steps can be split into Activity Definitions, which also have an instantiated entity called an Activities.

Casewhere could as such be used for Inventory, Manufacturing, Sales, Services, Marketing, Help Desk, Financial, and much more, but it will seldom make sense to use Casewhere for such business areas when there are thousands of systems that are specialized in doing this. Casewhere is although unique in its ability to tie such systems together and ensure that the dependencies these systems have are automated, administered and audited.

The next step

Casewhere is not an easy system to explain, since its power lies in being able to fill in the gaps between other systems. It does not operate under the assumption that it must manage certain domains or business areas. It might as such be more fair to call Casewhere a Platform, since the system enables you to build up an almost endless number of specialized systems or applications.

Explaining a system, which does not include in its default data model even the most common objects like Users and Groups, will therefore also be more challenging than systems that have a more limited predefined purpose. Many concepts may seem extremely abstract in the beginning, so we will now and then reference some of our demo sites and setups in order to explain how the different functionality can be used.

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