When you're working on a Ticket, Action or Case, operational issues can occur which have an effect on how you're able to deliver the process. It is important to record these as a way to highlight them for others who may view or work on the item, and to help with longer term efforts to improve process delivery.
The Defects section on your work item screens in Enate is there to help you record and manage incidents like this when they occur. If defect categories have been configured in the service line for a Ticket in Builder, a Defects Card will show in that Ticket's screen in Work Manager that provides the functionality to record defects for the work item.
Defects can occur for a wide variety of reasons, for example:
A client is late supplying information you've requested
A supplier has attached the wrong file
Something's gone wrong as part of the service centre's handling of the activity.
It is very important to record defects, for various reasons:
while the work item is still in progress, it gives other agents who might be viewing or working on the activity an instant heads-up of issues which have occurred or are still happening which they'll likely need to know about
after a work item has been closed, it helps serve as an accurate record of what went on and what went wrong - which might be important if you're reviewing a specific item and need to be able to explicitly show for example when a client took longer responding with critical information.
in the longer term it's really useful as part of analysis to spot patterns in where issues are occurring and where improvements can be made - perhaps there's a repeated quality issue with information from an external party, or a given customer if consistently late supplying information at a certain point in process. If defects aren't recorded, it's likely otherwise resolvable issues will still continue to happen.
It is important to note that the defects feature isn't linked to the way the Enate system determines SLA information.
Recording a defect is simple - with a Ticket, Action or Case open, simply expand the Defects card and click to add a new record.
Select the relevant category that the defect falls under.
If you're finding that some options are missing from the category list, i.e. a type of issue is happening regularly but there isn't really a sensible category for it, feed this back to your business admins and request to get it added to the category list.
Select the area of responsibility from the ‘Party at Fault’ drop-down - e.g. your organisation, a third party supplier, or the client themselves
Then add a relevant description.
If your system is set up to do so, you can also add the number of affected records - an example of when this can be useful is if your were running a payroll process for 100 employees and a defect occurs affecting 20 payslips, you can add that extra detail in here, which can be useful for subsequent reporting.
You can add as many defects as are needed if multiple issues occur.
Once you have recorded a defect on a particular work item, it is shared with all related cases, tickets and actions in the same manner as contacts are.
If a defect gets resolved while the work item is still open, you can go to the defect card and mark it as resolved.
If a defect was applied to a work item by accident or the defect itself was recorded incorrectly, you can chose to delete it as long as the work item is still in progress.
Any user can add a defect and mark defects as resolved. However, be aware that if the 'Restrict Defect Modification' setting in the System Settings section of Builder is enabled, only the agent who created the defect record can subsequently modify or delete a defect.
Once you're happy with all the details for your new Defect record, or with your changes if you're editing an existing one, click 'Submit' to save your changes.