Tutorial
- Creating an Agent
This tutorial shows how the various tasks in creating
an agent are related to each other. It shows that managing task
execution rules is performed for each task in an agent, but that
specifying an event condition is performed once for an agent.
Scenario
You are the Director of Sales at The Great Outdoors Company.
The Finance department identified a problem with invoice payments.
Analysis of warehouse data shows that a large proportion of late
payments are by customers who returned damaged or faulty items and
did not receive replacements.
Customers tend to withhold payment for the entire order even
if only one or two items are in dispute. They may even refuse to
pay for other completed orders until the disputed order is resolved.
Therefore, rapid resolution of the returns issues has a direct
effect on cash flow. The Director of Finance asks you to establish
a process that closely monitors data for problems with high rates
of return and takes immediate action to resolve any problem it detects.
Solution
You decide to use Event Studio to detect event instances and
notify the people who must quickly resolve the issue.
You create an agent named high_returns_followup. The agent detects
cases where the actual value of returned products is greater than
the threshold value that the person running the agent defines. You
include a parameter in the event condition to represent this threshold
value. Initially, you concentrate on large return orders because
they have the greatest effect on cash received. After you address
problems with the largest returns, you monitor lower valued returns.
To provide sales representatives with customer contact information,
you decide to add a report task that runs the Customer Contact report.
The sales representatives can then quickly call the retailer and
try to resolve the issue.
When you add the email task, you specify that the email message
be in HTML format. When you edit an HTML message, you can click
a button that inserts a table. You list return values by order number
in the table. Then you attach to the email message both the report
that you saved in the report task and the event list that shows
the event instances for which the agent performed its tasks.
To create this example agent, perform the following tasks:
