You have always been able to see Workflow Specific details from inside a Contract Container, but now you can view those same details across all your contracts at once. By adding a Specific Stage onto your Reports, you'll be able to see how long that Contract was in that Stage. This will now allow you to run reports to see how long a group of Contracts were in a specific Stage for, find the average, and even get an idea of how long the entire Workflow process took.
Note: As of 2/25/20, these columns can only be added to created Views. They are not currently available on the default "View All Contracts" Grid, however you can make an easy View to see all your Contracts by simply using the criteria of:
ContractID --> Exists --> True.
How to add Specific Stages to your Report
When you are running any Contract View in UCM, under the Default Fields and Sequence section, where you decide what information will be displayed on your report, at the very bottom of the Left column are all your Workflow Stages. The individual Stages (B) are organized by the Workflows they are a part of to make them easier to find (A). This does NOT mean that each Stage will only show results if it is a part of that Workflow, however.
You can also add in the averages of how long all the Contracts in your View have been in a specific stage. At the bottom of the View creation screen, there is a new sections called Stage Averages. After you click to expand the section, you can select any number of specific Stages (A), and then the averages will appear after you run your View underneath the grid of data (B).
Viewing Specific Stage Details in your Report
With these Stages now a part of your Grid, any Contracts that are in your report will show the number of days it spent in each Stage, assuming it was in the selected Stages at some point. The Criteria for your Report does NOT have to be workflow related to see these results.
For instance, if you wanted to see how long each of your Affiliation Agreements where in the Legal Stage, the only criteria you would need for your Report would be what is pictured below:
You would then set your Default Fields and Sequence, or in other words, what information will be displayed in your report, to match the layout below.
- (1) Contract Name will be needed to of course know what Contract the information is for (Contract ID can be used too)
- (2) Workflow is needed since not all Contracts will have gone through the same Workflow and this will let you know which Workflow the Contract was a part of
- (3) Stage: Legal Review is the new column that will tell you how many days that specific Contract spent in the Legal Review Stage
You can of course add additional information into your report, such as Owner, Contract Value, etc. The layout above are jut the three columns you would NEED to have in your Grid to get the results from our example above.
How to Run a Report for a Specific Stage
If you wanted to run a Report that was specifically about how long Contracts were in a Specific Stage, then you WOULD need to include the Specific Stage details in your Criteria.
Under the Criteria, there is a new selection called Specific Stage (1). This new Criteria will allow you to select the specific Stage (2) you want to filter by and then you can select either Greater Than (>), Less Than (<), or Equals To (=) (3) for the number of days (4) that the Contract was in that stage.
So, as an example, if we wanted to see ALL our Contracts, regardless of their Type or anything else, that had been in the Legal Review Stage for more than 2 weeks, we would set our criteria as pictured below:
This Criteria will look through all of your Systems Contracts for any that went into the Legal Review Stage, and stayed there for longer than 14 days. That's the best part about this type of report, it is Historical!! It doesn't matter if a Contract has been active for months or even years, if it got held up in Legal for more than 2 weeks, it will be included on this report.
Your grid configuration for a Report like this would be almost identical to the one we configured above, however it would make sense to also include the Stage Name column. As I mentioned above, this report isn't going to show you all Contracts that are currently in the Legal Review Stage, just those that at any point in their life cycle spent more than 14 days in the Legal Review Stage. Adding in the Stage Name column will allow you to quickly see if any of the Contracts that are pulled back on this report are currently in the Legal Review Stage.
Total Days Till Last Stage
The final addition to reporting that was added with this enhancement was a new Criteria and Grid header called Total Days Till Last Stage. The purpose of this data point is so you can get the total number of days it took to get from the initial Workflow Stage to the current stage it is in. We believe this will be most useful once a Contract gets to it's Active stage, so in essence this will become the "how long did it take for this contract to get to an Active contract" data point, but it is not limited to only working with Active. This number will continually add up the number of days the contract has spent in all Workflow Stages, EXCEPT the Stage it is currently in.
If we take a look at an example below, we can see that our ABC Marketing Contract has a value of 27 in the Total Days Till Last Stage column. By looking at the other information in our grid, we can see that the current Workflow is Basic Workflow (A) and the current Stage is Active (B), with it being in the Active Stage for 145 days (C). Then we can see that it Historically had been in the Department Review Stage for 15 days (D), and the Legal Review Stage 12 (E).
The calculations that are taking place here are the 15 and 12 from our Department and Legal Review Stages adding up to 27. In our basic Workflow, the Stages go:
- Department Review
- Legal Review
- Active
- Expired
- Terminated
That means that since we are in the Active Stage, our Total Days Till Last Stage is adding in all the days of the two Stages prior to it's current one. If we were to move this Contract to Expired or Terminated at this time, then the Total Days Till Last Stage would automatically change to 172 since we'd add the 145 days it spent in Active to that total now.