Understanding how SLA’s work in CRM 2013. Effects of change in SLA details or deactivation of SLA on a case.

In think by this time, many of you must already have used the SLA feature that came with CRM 2013 SP1. Hence i am not going to explain here what that feature is and how can we use it for our implementations. Rather I would like to share my answers to the common questions that i regularly face from participants during training sessions on CRM 2013 SP1 SLA feature. Some of the common questions are

• What happens if the applicable SLA details changes for a case?
• What happens if an SLA is already applied to the case and if somebody has deactivated the SLA to modify the SLA details?
• What happens if an SLA is already applied to the case and if somebody has changed the SLA details in the middle for e.g for warning actions somebody has configured to send an email and the email subject and description is modified. Will the new SLA details be applied to the existing cases?

 

The first point we should always understand if CRM implements the SLA feature using background workflows. So if you know how workflow state persistence mechanism works you already have answers to all the above questions. Not getting what I am trying to explain. No issues. Let us take each of the questions one by one.

For this demo, I have created a default SLA with two SLA details – one for high priority cases and the other for fallback.

• For the high priority SLA detail, it expires if the First Response is not sent within 5 mins of the case creating and an warning goes at the end of one minute. In both the cases it sends out an email messaging accordingly
• For the fallback SLA detail, it expires if the First Response is not sent within 1 hour of creating the case and an warning goes at the end of 30 mins from case creation.

 

Check the screenshot below.

 

Scenario 1: Applicable SLA for a case changes when the case is updated.

I create a case with priority = ‘Norma’l’. The default SLA is applied and the First Response by is set to 1 hour from the creation of the case. Check the screenshot below

Now I go ahead and change the Priority to high. As soon as i do that the applicable detail for the case changes and as you can see in the screenshot below the First response by is set to 5 mins from the creation time of the case.

 

So what happened in the background? When the case was first created, a workflow triggered for the default SLA detail configuration. However when the priority of the case was changed to High, the previous workflow instance was cancelled and a new workflow instance with the configurations of the SLA details for high priority cases was initiated. You can check by going to the background processes of the case.

 

Scenario 2: SLA details for a SLA is updated while the SLA is already applied to a case or the SLA is deactivated after being applied to a case.

To demo this, what i have done is i created a case with high priority. The SLA for  high priority cases got applied to the case.

In the meantime i went ahead and deactivated the SLA and also changed the email subject and description that is sent when the SLA expires.

 

However when the email is sent after 5 mins of the case creation, the body and the subject is not reflecting the changes. It would still show the previous body and the subject. Similarly even if you deactivate the SLA after is has been applied to a case, the existing instances of the workflows for that SLA will continue as usual and will not cancel out.

 

Hope this helps!