Use these troubleshooting tips to resolve workflow issues and streamline your automations with Mission Control.

1. My orders aren’t going to the right workflow queue when they leave queue X

Mission Control workflow has a variety of mechanisms to control where orders can go next when they are submitted in workflow.  They follow this priority order:

1. Business rules for the order’s current workflow queue are evaluated: if it has broken any rules, then it reroutes to a review queue

2. Each alternate path for the order’s current workflow queue is checked in sequence: if the order meets all conditions for a path that has a destination queue, then the order will reroute to that queue

• Note that alternate paths later in the list will not be checked or triggered.  If the order meets all conditions for multiple paths that have destination queues, it will use the queue for the first path in the defined sequence

• Note that alternate paths can transfer documents between stages (quote to order, order to invoice) or trigger workflow actions instead of changing the queue

3. The primary path for the order’s current workflow queue is the default destination: if none of the other checks reroute the order, then it goes here

Once the order has reached its destination queue:

4. On Entry workflow actions for the destination queue are triggered

5. Automated actions that are set to “Triggered” for the destination queue will immediately submit the order again if it meets the specified conditions, automatically moving it another step in workflow.  If that’s the case, start back at bullet 1 for business rule evaluation, with the destination queue now being considered the order’s current queue

• Note that this loop can continue multiple times - keep going until you get to a destination queue that does not have a triggered automatic action, or that has conditions that do not apply to this document.  If the document loops back to any queue that it has already been in for part of this processing, then it will stop there to prevent infinite looping

Things to keep in mind:

• If business rules and automated actions are not enabled, then they will not reroute documents.

• Business rules can be set to trigger once or always.  When set to trigger always, they will reroute documents that are still breaking that rule after any time the document has changed or the rule has been updated.  When set to trigger once, they will reroute a document the first time it breaks that rule, and then they will not reroute it again after it has been approved, even if the document or rule changes.

• Automated actions can be set to trigger on a periodic schedule.  It is possible that they are rerouting documents unexpectedly when they trigger every 15 minutes or every hour or so on, so you should also check for periodic automated actions that trigger on any of the destination queues.

• Make sure all of the latest edits to the workflow are published.  Prior to publishing, the workflow is in a draft state and will not affect how documents are processed.

2. This order only triggered some of the entry actions for its new workflow queue

This can happen when multiple actions are set up to trigger in a row.  If any action fails, workflow processing halts.  A workflow audit log reports the issue and how far it got before it failed.  

When this happens, the document stays in its current queue.  Because entry actions trigger once a document changes queues, it will stay in the new queue even though it did not go through all of the actions.  It may work better for your process to set up sequenced actions as the last step of the previous queue (via alternate paths) instead of the first step of the new queue - that will make the document stay in the old queue if anything fails, so it cannot continue in workflow until all of the actions have completed successfully.

3. This workflow condition isn’t catching the right orders

Review the Conditions section of the Mission Control workflow management documentation for more information.

4. My “within” date condition isn’t catching the right orders

Date comparisons are always based on Eastern Daylight Time.  The comparison can be for a specific fixed date (like “Jan 1, 2020”), another date field (like “sales order’s Requested Delivery Date”), or a date offset compared to today’s date (like “3 days ago”, or “5 days from now”).  

“Is Within” and “Is Not Within” use date ranges for the comparison, and they work a little differently when the right side is the date from another field, compared to being based on the current date:

• When compared to the current date, the range used starts at the current date and extends out to the indicated number of days before or after that date. The range only extends one way; the current date is always on one end of the range. If the left-side field date falls inside the range or on either end date of the range, it is within the range.

• When a field is used on the right side, the condition is using the number of days between the two fields and the first date is within the second date if the two dates are no more than the specified number of days apart (regardless of which date is on which side of the condition).

Note that “Is Before” is like a “less than” check, and “Is After” is like a “greater than” check, while “Is On Or Before” and “Is On Or After” are like “less than or equal to” or “greater than or equal to” respectively.  This affects the behavior of your condition.  If you want orders with a Requested Delivery Date before 5 days from now to do something special, and orders that are exactly 5 days out should also follow that rule, then you should use “Is On Or Before”.  If orders that are exactly 5 days out should not do the same thing as orders that are less than 5 days out, then you should use “Is Before”.

5. “Reserve Inventory for All Items” is letting orders continue in workflow even when they didn’t actually reserve inventory

Workflow actions don’t prevent documents from continuing in workflow unless they encounter a true error.  This is because they would otherwise block automatic workflow movement and require manual reviews to resolve situations that aren’t actually issues, slowing down your process.

“Reserve Inventory for All Items” is considered successful if it can reserve all items for the order, or any items, or no items at all.  If you need orders to be handled differently based on whether they are fully, partially, or not reserved, then you can set up alternate paths with conditions that check the order’s Status for “Fully Reserved” or “Partially Reserved” and route orders accordingly.

Refer to this documentation for more information on workflow actions that are considered successful even when they might seem to be unsuccessful.  If you use those actions, and you need to handle those situations differently, then you can trigger alternate paths, automatic actions, or business rules after the workflow action to catch those orders for special handling.

6. My automatic action isn’t triggering when I expect

Automatic actions have three different modes:

• Periodic - triggers on the indicated interval, e.g. every 15 minutes, every hour, every day

• Scheduled - triggers at a certain time on specific days of the week, e.g. at 5am on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays

• Triggered - triggers immediately when documents enter the specified workflow queue

If you need an automatic action to trigger once per day on specific days, use the Scheduled mode.  This is helpful for tasks like automatically pushing orders to the Ready to Pick queue at the start of each day for the warehouse, and automatically invoicing orders at the end of each day to finalize all orders shipped that day.

If you need an automatic action to trigger multiple times throughout the day, use the Periodic mode.  The interval calculations begin at midnight UTC.  Convert UTC to your time zone to determine when the first run triggers; for example, Eastern time is 4 hours behind UTC during Daylight Savings Time and 5 hours behind UTC when it is not Daylight Savings Time.  This means that from March to November these actions first trigger at 7pm, and from November to march they first trigger at 8pm.  Then they continue triggering automatically throughout the day based on their set interval.

7. The automatic action for my Backorder queue isn’t always reserving items for the oldest order first

When an automatic action is set up to process orders in a particular workflow queue, and the workflow queue is set to trigger the workflow action “Reserve Inventory for All Items”, then the automatic action will submit each order in that queue in the same sequence that they entered that queue.  So the order that has been waiting in the queue longest will be submitted first and get reservations first.

When the automatic action has a condition set to only submit orders that could become fully reserved based on checking the product’s available inventory, then this can implicitly give some priority to lower quantity orders.  Orders are still checked in sequence based on which have been waiting in that queue longest, and the first order that can fulfill all its quantity requirements will get reservations first.  This helps avoid the problem of large orders hoarding reservations and preventing smaller orders from being able to ship.  However, this can also mean that a single large order can wait longer even if it’s the oldest order in the queue, if newer orders are able to reserve smaller quantities of that same item.  Incorporating a check for the order’s Days In Queue can help ensure large orders avoid being perpetually stuck.