"IS UPDATED" in Workflow Policy

Statuary Warning: This is not for the old horses.

My romantics with siebel goes on and so Siebel mysteries. Newbies better be careful while using "IS UPDATED" condition in the workflow policies. It can lead to undesirable/wrong results. Lets consider below problem statement.

"Any service request which is not worked within 2 hours of assignment, i.e. Assigned status , should be escalated."

The obvious solution which comes in mind is to configure workflow policy with duration and Owner Id update condition.

Unfortunately it didn't work for me. The issue when using "IS UPDATED" criteria in combination with Workflow duration is that criteria is considered only at the time of the first update by the user. Until the configured policy duration has completed, all subsequent updates to the record are discarded by Workflow Policy Manager. As a result at any point of time only one record is available in "S_ESCL_STATE" table for this policy. At the end of the configured duration, Workflow Policy Manager looks at the other configured criteria on the policy. If they evaluate to true policy Action is fired. If they do not evaluate as configured, then the record is discarded and the next time the record is updated a new record will is inserted into S_ESCL_REQ and subsequently, S_ESCL_STATE for the duration. At times, this may result in undesirable behavior as follow.

Lets consider we assign a SR to user A at 7:00 AM. As per our configured policy it should be escalated at 9:00 AM if status is "Assigned". User A works on this request and again re-assigns request to user B at 7:30. Now ideally escalation should happen at 9:30 AM and not at 9:00 AM. But if we check "S_ESCL_STATE" table there will be only one record for this policy with END_TM set to 9:00 AM. If user B doesn't work on this request till 9:00 then this request will be escalated resulting in unwanted escalation.

There are multiple workarounds for the above mentioned issue.

a) Workflow Batch processing

b) Batch workflow policies

One potential solution could be to maintain "Last Assigned" date field and set this to current timestamp whenever assignment/re-assignment is happening. Use this date in the searchspec to find records which are in assigned status for more than 2 hours. Create workflow Process Batch Manager RCR with following parameters:

SearchSpec: [Last Assigned] < (Timestamp() - 0.084)

WorkFlow: SR Escalation Workflow

This will process all records which are in Assigned status for more than 2 hours.