One of the most common errors when tracking tasks is related to the transfer of information between people. Generally, when a task is performed by a single person, its management tends to be efficient. But what happens when different teams or individuals are involved?
Odoo proposes a solution to address this issue through the use of "activities." Activities are actions that need to be carried out at some point and can be assigned to oneself or to another person. This is an effective way to notify someone about a pending task and ensure it doesn't get forgotten. Let's look at an example:
- An employee requests a medical leave.
- The human resources department reviews it, approves the leave, and assigns an activity to the employee to upload the medical certificate, necessary for properly documenting the absence.
This example demonstrates how an activity can be used in a straightforward manner. Building on this, let's create a slightly more complex example. Suppose that in our organization, the Human Resources department is required to review these documents to ensure they are complete and accurate. How do we go about it?
The first solution would be for the employee to create an activity for the Human Resources department. However, this solution could have a significant drawback: the employee might forget to create the activity since it's not a task they regularly perform.
The second solution would be to use a chained activity. A chained activity is one that is automatically generated after another, based on the type of activity being dealt with. How would this work in our example?
- An employee requests a medical leave.
- The human resources department reviews the request, approves it, and assigns an activity to the employee to upload the medical certificate.
- Once the document is uploaded, an activity is automatically created for a member of the HR department responsible for conducting the review.
This change is essential to ensure that the employee doesn't forget pending tasks. Furthermore, this solution can also be applied in more complex situations to avoid relying on users' memory and standardize work processes. Let's consider another example:
Suppose that in our factory, we need to perform preventive maintenance on a critical machine by an external company on March 1st. In this case, the maintenance personnel could do the following:
- Create an activity for February 1st to call the technical service and confirm that they will perform preventive maintenance.
- Once the call is made, a new task is automatically generated to notify the factory manager on February 14th to take the necessary preventive measures.
- After speaking with the factory manager and closing the activity, a new activity is created for March 1st to remind us to upload the service technician's action report.
As we have seen, this approach allows for consistency and prevents users from having to remember multiple rules they don't regularly use.
How are these chained activities created?
To set up chained activities, you need to access developer mode and go to the Settings / Technical / Conversations / Activity Types screen. From there, you can add the chaining logic in the Next Activity section. In the examples mentioned, the "Trigger the next activity" activity type would have been used, although suggestions can also be provided for the user to choose from.