Tasks Assistant

The Tasks assistant in Unit4 Advanced Virtual Assistant (Ava) allows managers to approve tasks, and also flag important tasks and proactively push against deadlines and due dates. Moreover, it helps employees to keep up to date on the status of requests.

System requirements

• Task Management Experience Pack 2.3 or later installed (latest version recommended)

System setup

Access rights

Assign access rights for the relevant users as listed in User access checklist.

Process definitions

• Specify the Process definition for each element type with distribution rules for the users. Workflow processes with user defined actions are supported. Note that user defined actions must not contain non-alphanumeric characters.
• For more details on process definition refer to Reference Manual Workflow.

Proactive notifications

To receive proactive notification of pending tasks, define importance criteria (high or very high) for each relevant element type.

Ava will notify you if:

• Workflow assigns you a task as "last owner of task".
• Workflow assigns you a task as "task initiator".
• Workflow assigns you a task with high or very high importance, as defined for the relevant element type.
• Workflow detects an active new-task alert, as defined in Alert setup. Note that Ava has its own response text and does not apply the defined alert template.
• Your request has been approved and the workflow is completed.

Note that some workflow tasks cannot be completed in the chatbot, for example, correction/ammendment tasks in an entry window. By default Ava will not notify the user about such tasks. This behaviour can be changed by enabling the feature flag u4da-tasks-notify-unsupported-tasks for the tenant. Notifications for these tasks contain only limited information and a link to Unit4 ERP where the task can be completed. Caution: If this feature is enabled, users might also get notifications for tasks that have already been handled by other people (in case of workflow steps with multiple approvers).

Tasks notifications setup

Refer to the Ava notifications guide.

Element types

The following element types are available with the Tasks Assistant and the new Tasks web viewer:

• Absences
• Timesheet
• Requisitions
• Good receipts
• Purchase orders
• Invoices
• Travel expenses
• Travel requests

When approval tasks are shown (either because the user has required it or it's a notification), actions can be performed on the tasks, such as approve or reject. You can view tasks in Unit4 ERP by clicking the View button.

Grouping of tasks

The parameter TM_TASK_STEP_GRP can be used to set how tasks are grouped when shown in Ava.

• When activated, tasks are grouped by user step name (and element type)
• When deactivated tasks are grouped by element type

In both scenarios, Ava shows all actions that are shared by all tasks currently being displayed.

Note that when naming user steps, consideration should be given to choosing meaningful and descriptive step names and how these will appear in Ava, etc.