Prioritizing Submissions

If you use Hyperscience to process many kinds of documents, you may want to assign deadlines to certain submissions, especially if you're working to meet SLAs for your customers. With our SLA rules, you can assign deadlines to submissions that come from a certain source or match a particular layout. You can also escalate tasks in the Task Queue by moving a submission's deadline to a new time.

While we can't guarantee that submissions will be completed by their deadlines, we do use the deadlines to:

• prioritize machine-processing tasks.
• order tasks in the Task Queue.
• inform you when each task is due.

Ways to assign deadlines

Our processing-prioritization tools give you the flexibility to assign and adjust deadlines to meet the needs of your business.

All submissions have a processing deadline, whether it's the system-default deadline or one assigned in the following ways:

• upon being processed through a certain flow and Input Block.
• upon being matched to a certain Structured or Semi-structured layout.

When setting deadlines at the system level or for a specific layout or connector, you can specify deadlines for each set of conditions that make sense for your business.

• Each condition is defined by submission-creation time. You can set conditions for submissions created At anytime or Before [a certain time of day].

• For each condition, you can set a deadline to be at a specific time of day or after a certain amount of time has passed since the submission’s creation

• Examples:

• "New submissions created before 5:00 PM should be processed within 30 minutes of the time of submission."

  • “New submissions created before 11:00 PM should be processed before 12:00 PM on the next business day after submission.”

• You can define a set of business days and holidays for your instance. To learn more, see Defining business days.

• When determining which condition to use for a submission’s deadline, we start at the beginning of your list of conditions and use the first one that the submission qualifies for. In this way, your list can be thought of as an “if...else…” decision tree. Therefore, we recommend ordering your conditions in chronological order, based on the submission-creation times in their definitions.

For more information, see Application Settings Overview, our API documentation (opens in new tab), or Layout Priority.

You can also manually adjust a deadline for a submission in the Task Queue. Any changes you make apply to the entire submission, not just the task whose tab you're in. To learn more, see Navigating the Task Queue.

No matter how you assign deadlines, we will use the system time zone you specified during installation to set deadlines for your submissions.

Defining business days

Many document-processing SLAs take business days into account (e.g., documents will be completely processed within 2 business days). With the Business Calendar setting, you can create submission-processing deadlines that have normal business days and holidays factored in. For example, you can define a deadline for submissions to be processed on the day of submission if that day is a business day, or you can ask for submissions to be processed by a certain time on the next business day after submission.

To define business days for your instance:

1. Go to Administration > System Settings, and select General from the View drop-down list at the top of the page.
2. Scroll down to the Business Calendar card, and click its Edit link.
3. Define normal business days.

• Under Business Days, select the checkboxes for the days of the week that your organization is typically open for business. By default, the checkboxes for weekdays are selected.
  • Deselect the checkboxes for any days your organization isn’t normally open.

4. Define non-business days (holidays).
   1. Under Non-Business Days, click Add Non-Business Days.
   2. In the dialog box that appears, enter the name for the holiday in the Name field (e.g., New Year’s Day).
   3. Do one of the following:

• If the holiday is a single day, click inside the Date field, and select the date of the non-business day in the calendar. - If the holiday spans consecutive days, select the Spans multiple days checkbox. Then, click inside the Date field, and select the days of the holiday in the calendar (e.g., December 24-26).

  5. Repeat step 4 for each holiday you need to add.
  6. Click Done.
  7. Click Save.
  8. Review the changes listed in the dialog box.

• If they’re correct, click Confirm.

  • If they’re not correct, click Cancel, and make any necessary changes. You can select or deselect each business day, and you can edit or delete each non-business day.

How we determine the deadline for each submission

When a submission qualifies for multiple deadlines (e.g., a connector-specific deadline and a layout-specific deadline, multiple layout-specific deadlines for a multipage submission), we will use the deadline closest to the current time. Therefore, if you assign a deadline for a submission upon its creation, that deadline may change when its pages are matched to layouts. If it does change, the submission’s deadline will never be extended, only expedited. However, if you adjust a submission's deadline in the Task Queue, you can override the assigned deadline to extend it. For example, you can assign a 3-hour deadline for a submission through the API while also having a 2-hour layout-specific deadline. Once the submission’s pages are matched to layouts, the layout-specific deadline of 2 hours overrides the deadline that is set through the API. To extend the 2-hour deadline, you can adjust the submission's deadline in the Task Queue. To learn more, see Navigating the Task Queue.

If submissions are overdue, we will prioritize them according to how much time has passed since their deadlines, with the ones that have been overdue the longest being prioritized first. We prioritize overdue tasks before tasks that have deadlines in the future.

Migrating layouts

Moving your Hyperscience layouts from one instance to another may affect your submission-processing deadlines. To learn more, see Importing & Exporting Settings.

Next steps

• To learn how to edit the system-level SLA rule, see Application Settings Overview.
• To learn how to configure SLA rules for submissions based on their flow and Input Block, or layout variation, see SLA Rules Tab.
• To learn how to configure SLA rules from a layout details page, see Layout Priority.