SLA & OLA

SLA (Service Level Agreement) and OLA (Operational Level Agreement) are the agreements which are often used in the software development industry to measure performance. SLA is used to measure the target performance during the execution of a process. SLA is created in order to ensure the result quality of the process and the agreed turnaround time will be achieved with customer commitment. OLA is used to help the internal teams to work together in order to achieve the service requirement level in the SLA. Moreover, another difference between SLA and OLA is that SLA is responsible for the turnaround time between IT service provider and customer, OLA is responsible for the turnaround time between IT service provider and another department within the company.

Process Designer does not provide an out of the box SLA task. But we can work around to implement an SLA in process designer using the Timer event.

For example, an SLA can be defined as "When the credit application is submitted by the user, the reviewer and approval have to decide whether this credit application should be approved or rejected within 5 days". Therefore, when process is executed, we desire that our process can be operated according to this agreement. The timer event in PD can be used to develop the OLA in order to support SLA as shown in figure below.

This process is initiated when a credit application is submitted by the customer. This application is reviewed by the user in the Review human task. The timer event is used to listen as shown in the figure below. If the credit application is not reviewed within two days, this application is sent to Manager group in order to review. Afterward this application is checked for completion on the exclusive gateway. If this application is complete, it is sent to approve decision which is represented by "Decision to approve" in human task, otherwise the process will end. For the details on how to configure the timer is explained in 6.4.3.3.4 Timer section