As well as selling office equipment, Miller Ltd also offer their customers an extensive maintenance service. Miller Ltd has signed several maintenance contracts with one of their customers.

The same terms of payment are valid for all the maintenance contracts signed with that customer. These maintenance contracts are assigned to a master contract which contains all terms of payment.

The customer would like to change the terms of payment. The employee responsible at Miller Ltd, Ms. Connelly, changes the terms of payment in the master contract and the changes are automatically copied into all the assigned lower level contracts.

If an error occurs in the system to prevent the changes from being made, Ms. Connelly receives a work item in her integrated inbox for each of the lower level contracts that could not be changed. She can change the lower level contract directly from the inbox using the information displayed in another window about the changes made in the master contract.

If any of the lower level contracts that need to be changed are blocked by another employee, the system carries out the changes in the background. If the document remains blocked, Ms. Connelly receives a work item for that lower level contract in her integrated inbox. Starting the work item causes the system to try and change the lower level contract in the background. The work item stays in Ms. Connelly’s inbox until the changes could be made or an application error occurs. If an application error occurs, Ms. Connelly receives another work item in her integrated inbox that can only be processed online. Once the lower level contract has been changed, the work item is completed and the document is unblocked.

The lower level contracts that have not yet been updated are blocked for manual processing until the workflow has finished successfully.