It's holiday time and you are frantically checking your cell phone for the status of your last-minute office gift items. With every shot of eggnog, you can only hope that your requested items will arrive to your office buddies in the nick of time. Will Bob get his shiny new mouse on time? With ServiceNow's "estimated delivery date" and "delivery date", you can know exactly when your requested items will arrive so you can spend more time enjoying the season and less time checking your phone.
The delivery date and estimated delivery date are defined in the Service Catalog in the following ways:
- The delivery date is the final date the requested item is delivered to you.
- The estimated delivery date for the request is the maximum date of all the delivery dates of the requested items in your cart.
Each catalog item is associated with an execution plan or workflow. The requested item's delivery date depends on the associated workflow or execution plan. If a catalog item is not associated with an execution plan or workflow, a default execution plan is associated to the catalog item.
If you have a requested item that's associated with the workflow, then the delivery date is the expected time to complete this workflow. Each workflow can have a predefined time to be completed. To configure this predefined time, you can modify the Expected Time column in the WorkFlow Version table for the workflow that's associated with the item:
If the requested item is associated to an execution plan, then the delivery date is calculated based on the time it takes to complete the execution plan. The delivery date is calculated using the Total Delivery Time column in the Execution Plan table.
Here's an example of an order that includes three requested items that are calculated differently:
- Keyboard (associated with the execution plan IT Service Hardware)
- Mouse (associated with the workflow Service Catalog Request)
- Headphones (not associated with a workflow or execution plan)
Here's what your order will look like in checkout. You'll see that the estimated delivery date becomes the maximum of the delivery dates of the requested items:
To find out how exactly how each requested item delivery date is determined, go to Service Catalog > Maintain Items. You can see how each item is calculated by viewing the Execution Plan and Workflow columns. You can see that the Mouse and Keyboard are associated to the Workflow and Execution Plan respectively, and that the Headphones item is not associated to either.
The keyboard item is associated with an execution plan and the delivery date is calculated according to the time it takes to complete the execution plan. The delivery date is calculated based on the total delivery time of the execution plan:
The mouse item is associated with a workflow. The delivery date is calculated according to the Workflow schedule:
The headphones item is not associated with any workflow or execution plan, so, by default, it is associated with the Default execution plan. The delivery date is calculated according to the Total Delivery Time of the Default execution plan. In this case, the default execution plans takes two days to complete delivery:
To ensure that your company's items arrive in a timely manner, here's where you can learn more about how to define a service catalog workflow and create execution plan tasks for your service catalog:
- Defining a Service Catalog Workflow - ServiceNow Wiki
- Creating Execution Plan Tasks - ServiceNow Wiki
For other ways to customize your service catalog, see:
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