Suspenses

Suspenses is a proprietary product we have built. It is a “todo list on steriods” for our clients. It allows us to automatically create items that a user needs to address and link those items to different entities in the system. For example, we have used it to add a “Duplicate VIN” to a vehicle entity and a “Missed Clockout” to a worker entity. These suspenses are assigned to an employee of the company to investigate.

We have also built front-end components that allow us to easily add a list of entity-linked suspenses. For example, when viewing a “Worker” page, if there are any suspenses to be addressed for that worker, they are shown on the page. Therefore, whomever is viewing the page can immediately see that there is outstanding work to be done.

Properties

A suspense has a number of useful properties, including Assigned To, Start Date, Due Date, and Priority. This allows us to show each user a queue of their work, when it is due, and how important it is.

Types

Each type of suspense, like Duplicate VIN or Missed Clockout in the examples above, have to be pre-defined. Some other types we have created are:

• Data Quality
• Terminal Offline
• Print Document
• Follow Up (set a Start Date for the future so an employee can follow up with a customer)

Attributes

Each custom suspense type can be configured to accept different attributes. For example, a Missed Clockout suspense has a worker-id and a Terminal Offline has both terminal-id and last-checkin.

Using the Suspense Product

The suspense product exposes a number of Greyhound Requests and Notifications. All communications with the suspenses product should go through Greyhound.

Note

Although the suspense tables may exist in the project you are using, you should not write code that queries or updates them. Pull requests will be failed if SQL is introduced that relies on those tables.

Advanced Usages

We can uses suspenses to create a sudo workflow. For example, when an insurance policy is 90 days before its expiration, we can automatically create two suspenses: Quote Policy Renewal, Verify Employee Count. Each of these suspenses would have a policy-id attribute to associate them to the same policy. The suspense product raises a SuspenseCompletedNotification when a suspense is completed. In a hanlder of that notification, we can check to see if both suspenses have been completed. If so, we can automatically create a Renewal Review suspense for an employee to check the renewal. When they complete the Renewal Review, we automatically create a Print Document with the policy document to send to the insured.