CRM SLA Failure and Warning times, not what you would expect!

When you configure an SLA item in CRM, you have the option to specify the “Failure” and “Warning” times as a duration.

The format of these fields Is the same as any other CRM duration field, but what does it really mean? For example, if you set it to 10 days, is it 10 calendar days? Is it 10 business days? You might be surprised it is neither!

First let’s backtrack a little bit and look at the SLA definition. At the SLA level you can define “Business Hours” which captures the business days of the week, business hours of the day as well as any holidays during which an SLA should not apply. Let’s see what happens to your 10 day SLA depending on your business hour configuration in different scenarios. For simplicity I will assume you do not have “pause” when the record is on-hold.

1.       No Business Hours

If you leave this “Business Hours” field blank, then the system will assume 24x7 and therefore, the “Failure” and “Warning” times you set are simply calendar days, it will be simply a duration which is quite straight-forward. Therefore, when you create the record, you will have exactly 10 days (240 hours) before the SLA fails.

2.       Business Hours Configured (Work Days only)

In this case you configure your Business Hours only for the work days (e.g. Mon-Fri) but you leave the work hours as 24-hour (i.e. your business day has 24 hours):

In this case, what happens to your 10-day SLA is that it becomes a 10 business day SLA. Therefore, when you create a case, you will have 14 calendar days before the SLA fails because the weekend days will not be counted.

3.       Business Hours Configured (Including Work Hours)

Now this is where things get really messy unexpectedly. Imagine you configure your business hours to be Mon-Fri from 09:00 to 17:00 so that you have 8 working hours per business day. What happens to the 10-day SLA failure?

I create a case and to my surprise, the system gives me almost 42 calendar days to resolve the case before failing SLA:

This seems really random. What happens here is that the “Failure” time of 10 days is actually a duration (not the actual count of calendar or business days). In other words, the SLA will fail after 240 “business hours”. Because I only have 8 business hours per day then this means 30 business days and because of the weekends it ends up giving me almost 42 days. This is definitely not what I would expected when I configured by failure time to 10 days. Therefore, I just decided to leave my work hours as 12am-12am (24 hours) and then I would fall under #2 above in which I get 10 business days for resolving the case as I expected.

Adding holidays to your calendar works similar to the work days, it will just exclude the entire day from the count. Do not expect the timer to “pause” when you are outside of working hours because the timer has actually been increased to account for the time that you will have outside of business hours, so the timer countdown is always real time (duration) and can only pause when you configure pause for “on-hold” status.

I hope you find this useful, I think unless you have really fast SLAs (defined in hours or minutes) it almost makes no sense to think about configuring working hours. My conclusion is that if you SLAs which are defined in number of days you most likely should leave the work hours to 24 hours in order for the timer to make sense. Alternatively if you keep working hours you would need to define your SLA items as a function of business hours, so for my example, if the business hours are from 9am to 5pm then that means that for a 10 business day SLA I would need to define my failure time as 10*(number of business hours per day) = 80 hours. The small caveat here is that if you change your business hours then you need to update all your SLA items as the above formula could have changed. In either case you should still configure your workdays to exclude weekends if desired though.

SLA Behavior when Reopening CRM Cases

After a case is resolved, the user can reactivate the case but what happens to the SLA when this occurs? In some scenarios you might want to restart the SLA timer while in other cases you’d want to SLA the remain unchanged. This posts explores a bit both possibilities. Note that this post was tested with CRM 2015 and enhanced SLAs.

One of my recent requirements was that whenever a case is reopened, the applicable SLA would need to restart counting again as if it were a new case that just got created. This lead me to explore what kind of control we have on SLAs when a resolved/cancelled case is brought back to in progress.

In my first attempt, I had created an enhanced SLA for which the “Applicable From” field was the CreatedOn field, meaning that the “start” of the SLA timer is the creation date of the case:

In my test SLA I give the users 5 minutes to resolve the case before the SLA is considered as “failed”. Then I created a case and resolved it after 1 minute which causes the case to succeed the SLA. I can see in the associated SLA KPI instance that everything looks as expected:

Note: The SLA KPI Instance is the entity in CRM that holds the information about the SLA of a given case, there is one SLA KPI instance per case that has an SLA.

Now I reactivate the case and notice that although the case is now active, the SLA KPI instance has not changed, so the case is considered to have succeeded the KPI even though it is still active (there is no timer anymore):

I can edit anything in the case and resolve it again and no change is logged to the original KPI instance and there will be no new KPI instance either. Even if I leave the case open for months before resolving it, this case is always considered to have met the KPI. Whether this behavior is expected or not is debatable because in some other scenarios you might have a manager re-open a case just to enter som additional information before closing it again and you might not want to lose the original SLA KPI instance information in that case. However, in my requirement, the SLA timer should start again, so what can we do?

It will not be possible to generate a new SLA KPI instance when a case is reactivated because this feature is not flexible to do so in CRM. However, we can trick to overwrite the existing SLA KPI instance and update it as though it were a new case when the case is reactivated. However, you will lose the historic SLA instance information from the first time that the case was resolved.

To do so, the first thing you need to do is base your SLA on some other field that is not the “Created On” date. I believe it is a good practice to create a custom DateTime field in the case from which you always base your SLAs so this way you can implement any business logic to set the value of that field depending on many conditions (something you cannot do with the CreatedOn field which is read-only and will never change). So I created a new SLA based on my custom field:

Now I can set a simple business rule to populate the “SLA start” field with the value of “Created On” whenever a new case is created. Thus far, my SLA will behave the same as it did when I had it defined based on “Created On”. The only difference now is that I will also create a workflow which will update the SLA start field when the case is reopened and will set the value to “Execution Time” (time the case is reactivated).

When I repeat the same example as before, I notice that once I reactivate the case, the old SLA KPI instance information is lost and the entire SLA is recalculated and updated; this happens because a change occurs in the field on which the SLA is based (SLA start) which forces everything to re-calculate. So I achieve my requirement of restarting the SLA timer when the case is reopened. However, I would have much rather liked CRM to generate a new instance of an SLA KPI each time I reactivate the case so this way I can track the SLA timer after reopening the case but at the same time I do not lose the old KPI information which can be useful for reporting. I haven’t found a way to do so, but I would be happy to hear if anyone has solved this problem.

There I however, a big caveat with this approach and that is that because the “old” SLA KPI information is lost when reactivating the case then users can “cheat” by simply reactivating and re-resolving cases for which they did not meet the KPI and all of the sudden their KPIs look like they never missed any SLA!

If you don’t want your SLA timer to restart when a case is re-activated you just need to make sure that the “Applicable From” field that you use in your SLA definition will never change when a case is reopened (as is the case with the “Created On” field).