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Calculate SLA target times

When using service-level targets to measure and track the SLA response and resolution targets of requests, you need to use timers that determine when these targets are due.

The behavior of timers may appear inconsistent against standard 24-hour 7-day time, which can cause confusion. Understanding how timers work helps you specify the correct timer values so that your SLAs perform and are adhered to correctly.

This article explains how to calculate target times based on Working Time Calendars (WTCs).

Before you begin

To do this You need this role assigned
To create service SLAs Service Desk Admin Service Manager role
To configure SLA timers in Workflows Business Process Manager platform role
To create Working Time Calendars Admin platform role

Background

If you set a target time to be one day, a timer may not consistently meet its target after 24 hours. This is because target times do not use calendar time. Instead, they use Working Time Calendars (WTCs).

About Working Time Calendars

WTCs are created in Platform Configuration > Customization > Working Time Calendars.

A WTC is the record of your service desk’s availability. You can specify multiple WTCs in Hornbill to encompass different availabilities, as these may vary across team, region, department, and so on. For each WTC, you specify the hours and days of availability.

When you create an SLA for a service, you are required to associate it with a WTC. Timers for the SLA’s response and resolution targets work against the available hours within the associated WTC.

How to calculate timer targets

To help understand how WTCs affect SLA timers, keep in mind that it is common for working days to be less than 24 hours, and for weekend days to be excluded from the working week. Let’s consider a WTC that has been created with these two common conditions:

  • A working day is 7.5 hours, between 09:00 – 16:30.
  • A working week is Monday to Friday, inclusive.

Imagine you have a resolution target of five days. In the Workflow Designer, in a Hornbill Automation node, this is referred to as the expiry time. To implement this target, you must set the expiry time to 37 hours, 30 minutes (7.5 hours x 5 days) as the timer works in the context of the associated WTC. Timers are only active during the operational hours – the blue periods – of your WTC.

Operational hours are shown in blue

When configuring timers, you can specify values as Days, Hours, and Minutes.

It’s easiest, in the context of the WTC, to specify the 5-day target using the hour value. So, let’s consider the target to be 37.5 WTC hours (5 x 7.5). Those 37.5 working hours take 168 calendar hours to pass (24 x 7).

For most cases, using values of hours and minutes with timers is simpler that using days. The 37.5 working hours can also be expressed as 1 day 13 hours and 30 minutes, because the value of 1 calendar day equals 24 hours. Now let’s do the math to express the target as a non-whole number of days. As 1 calendar day equals 24 hours, we have 1 day (24 hours) plus 0.56 days (13.5 hours), which equals 37.5 hours. Therefore, expressing 37.5 working hours as days equates to a value of 1.56 days (37.5 / 24).

As a result, if the timer is initiated at 16:00 on a Tuesday, the timer expires the following Tuesday at 16:00. Against the WTC, this is 5 working days. This is the correct behavior of the timer.

Against a standard calendar, this behavior is equal to 7 days, which may cause confusion.

Confusion may also arise from the misuse of the value of days in timers. Continuing with our example, imagine the expiry time is set to a value of 5 days. In the context of the WTC, this equates to 120 hours (5 days x 24 hours). But 120 hours in the context of our 5-day work week and 7.5 hour workday means 16 working days (3 work weeks plus one workday). This means that if the timer is initiated at 16:00 on a Tuesday, it will expire three weeks and one day ahead, on Wednesday at 16:00.

This illustrates that it’s simpler to use hours (and minutes where applicable) rather than days to specify SLA timer values in Hornbill Automation nodes.

Further information

For information on service levels and configuration, see Service Levels.

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