Requirements for Bulk Reassessment

When identifying and reassessing cases in response to a system-wide change, typically the requirements for processing fall into one of these categories:

• Consistency

  All cases affected by the change must be identified and reassessed (i.e. all reassessments which are sufficient to make those cases consistent with the change). It is not acceptable for any case affected by the change to be "missed" during batch processing.

• Efficiency

  Only cases affected by the change should be identified and reassessed (i.e. only those reassessments which are necessary should occur). It can be wasteful to spend system time either reassessing cases which are not affected and/or reassessing any particular case more than once.

• Concurrency

  It must be possible to reassess cases in parallel batch streams (to promote scalability). It must be possible to reassess cases in batch while the online application is being used (to avoid the necessity for system downtime for online users).

• Business-specific control and processing

  You may have your own business-specific requirements to control reassessment of cases and/or perform additional processing, e.g.:

  • to reassess cases in a particular order, e.g. by surname of the claimant;
  • to reassess only a particular subset of cases, e.g. those for claimants who have social security numbers in a particular range; or
  • to perform additional business processing for each case, e.g. to send out special correspondence with each reassessed case which is pertinent only to bulk reassessment on this occasion, e.g. an explanatory leaflet sent to each claimant who has a case affected by a particular piece of legislation change.

In practice, there are trade-offs to be made to meet these requirements. Driving the Identification of Affected Cases describes the various approaches available for handling a bulk change, i.e. for identifying the cases identified so that they can each be reassessed.