Routing activities in pega

When a flow reaches an assignment shape, Pega has to decide who gets the work. That decision is made by a routing activity, an activity of type Route. Pega ships a set of standard ones in the Work- class, and you can write your own.

The standard routers

Router	Sends the assignment to
ToCreateOperator	The operator who created the case
ToWorklist	The worklist of a specific operator, passed as a parameter
ToWorkbasket	A workbasket named in a parameter, where any member can pick it up
ToWorkGroup	An available operator in the current work group; if nobody is available it goes to the manager
ToWorkGroupManager	The manager of the current operator's work group
ToDecisionTable / ToDecisionTree	Whoever a decision rule chooses, based on case data
ToCustom	Your own logic, set on the router's parameters

A related activity, TransferAssignmentToWorkBasket, is often called from a service level agreement so that an overdue assignment is moved to a workbasket automatically.

Worklist or workbasket?

• A worklist belongs to one person. The assignment is theirs.
• A workbasket is shared. Any operator who has access can take the next item, which is how call centre and back office queues work.

A worked example

In a bank's loan flow:

1. The Enter application assignment is routed with ToCreateOperator, so the clerk who started the case fills it in.
2. The Verify documents assignment goes to the workbasket DocumentCheck using ToWorkbasket. Any of the back office team can take it.
3. Loans over 500,000 use a decision table with ToDecisionTable, so they land in the SeniorUnderwriter workbasket instead.
4. If nobody acts on Verify documents for two days, an SLA escalation calls TransferAssignmentToWorkBasket and moves it to the manager's queue.

Tips

• Set routing on the assignment shape's Assign to field and pass parameters there, not inside the activity.
• Write your own router only when none of the standard ones fits, and copy a standard one as the starting point.
• Test with more than one operator, because routing bugs often only appear when the first choice is unavailable.

Continue with the Activity label.