Case hierarchy and structure considerations for designers

From a designer's perspective, you must consider several areas that may impact the user experience. Work closely with system architects (SAs) to build out cases in App Studio.

There are times when cases must be split into multiple cases instead of using a single large continuous flow:

• When another group of users, with a different role, is interacting with a subcase (for example, back-office workers processing claims that have been reported)
• When the subcase has its own distinct life cycle with a unique outcome
• When reporting on processes is critical (it is easier to report out on individual cases)
• When multiple people are working on a case at the same time (preventing overrides can be challenging) 

Complex business transactions may require the creation of multiple cases. For example, an auto insurance accident claim must be able to handle additional claims if the accident resulted in vehicle damage or physical injury. Based on this requirement, the Accident Claim case must be able to generate separate Vehicle Damage and Body Injury cases if necessary. In Pega Platform™, you can model case relationships with a case hierarchy that contains top-level cases and child cases.

The Accident Claim case is a top-level case, which is a case that does not have a parent case but can become a parent of other cases. Vehicle Damage and Body Injury are child cases, which represent work that must be completed to resolve the parent. A parent case that creates multiple child cases allows for work to be processed in parallel. Different parties with different expertise can handle each child case. When processing child cases in parallel, the parent case may need to wait until a child case is complete before the parent case can be resolved.

Child cases are beneficial in situations where you want to: 

• Model work that different parties perform
• Model work that follows different reporting options 
• Model work that follows different time frames
• Model work that is common to multiple case types

A customer service representative, an adjustor, and a repair shop can handle the Vehicle Damage child case. Meanwhile, a medical claim specialist and certain medical providers can handle the Body Injury child case.

Implementing a business process in a separate case type also allows you to reuse the case type as needed. For example, claims for both automobile and property insurance may involve a body injury claim. By implementing body injury claims as a separate case type, you can use the body injury case type with both automobile and property claims.

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