Triggering Second Workflow

  • 22 March 2017
  • 2 replies
  • 2 views

Userlevel 6
Badge +12

Hello All - 

I am looking for some feedback/best practices that you have seen or implemented and had success with.

I have a large workflow (currently sitting at 88 actions within 8 states in a state machine) and I am going to break it into 2 parts. The process has a perfect place to stop, but I am wondering how to approach it.

Part 2 begins when we receive external documentation and equipment has been installed, but the business would like to track how much time there is between when Part 1 ends and Part 2 kicks off. There is no define timeline on how long it should take or has to take, so they want to understand how long and go from there. Typically I would leave it in one workflow or state machine so we can see it easily, but separating them out presents a bit of a snag.

I was thinking of kicking off Part 2 as soon as Part 1 ends and then using a "Wait for item update". This would give me a time frame of how long it took to start Part 2. The issues I see with this is I will have the workflow running for (potentially) some unknown time before anything happens' taking up resources and possibly failing.

If I simply start Part 2 on when we receive the documents, they will need to do some manual calculations for each item. I could use some time stamps and update the list (Part 2 start - Part 1 end = time between parts).

Just looking for a different view happy.png

Thanks!


2 replies

Userlevel 3
Badge +9

You last suggestion of storing the date/time for when each process starts/ends would be the approach I would take.  Being in the list also lends itself to being exported to Excel for trending analysis. 

Another option is if you have versioning turned on, you could change a status value for the item.  Then you could simply look at the version history and see the date/time the status was changed. 

Userlevel 5
Badge +14

I would as well go with dedicated fields in the list.

it gives you as well possibility of auditing (if needed) what dates were really recorded (eg. id part2 is started several times), or if something goes wrong you have a place where to correct it.

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