How do I use timers, business calendars and time schedules for due dates and escalations in BAW?

Question

Due dates of our tasks must respect business hours and public holidays, with reminders and escalations. Which BAW features cover this and how are calendars maintained per country?

Answer 1

Three building blocks:

• Work schedules, holiday schedules and time zones: the work schedule defines business days and hours, the holiday schedule the non-working dates, the time zone completes it. They can be defined per process app, per BPD, per activity, or taken from the server defaults maintained in Process Admin.
• Due dates: an activity's Due in (e.g. 2 business days) is computed on the effective schedule - weekends and holidays are skipped when the schedule says so; the task's due date drives the portal's overdue indicators and the timer boundary events "before / after due date".
• Timers: timer boundary events on the activity (on due date, before due date - reminders, after due date - escalation) with repeat options; each timer path can send an e-mail, reassign to the manager team, raise priority, and loop back to the task (non-interrupting timers keep the task open).

BPD activity "Approve order": due in 2 business days (work schedule "DE office", holidays "DE-BY", time zone Europe/Berlin)
   timer boundary (non-interrupting) 1 day before due  -> [Send reminder e-mail]
   timer boundary (non-interrupting) on due date       -> [Escalate: reassign to team managers, priority High]
   timer boundary (interrupting) 5 days after due      -> [Auto-reject]
// in scripts, add business time with the TWDate helpers (e.g. addDays / addWorkingDays on your level - check the JavaScript API reference)
var due = new TWDate(); due.addDays(2);

// reading / setting a task due date in scripts and REST
var t = tw.system.findTaskByID(tw.local.taskId); t.dueDate = new Date(tw.local.newDue);     // JS API (server side)
PUT /rest/bpm/wle/v1/task/2078.456?action=update&dueDate=2025-06-30T16:00:00Z&parts=none   // REST

Per-country calendars: create one holiday schedule per country (or per region) in a shared toolkit so that every app uses the same lists, and select the schedule on the activity from data (the Time schedule option can be an expression, e.g. tw.local.request.country + " holidays"); maintain the holiday lists yearly (they are versioned with the snapshot - put them in the toolkit's next snapshot and upgrade dependencies, or on the server as default schedules that administrators edit in Process Admin without redeploy).

References

• BAW documentation - due dates, timers, work schedules and holiday schedules