I'm looking to create a workflow that will send out an email when a order status has not been updateed for X amount of days. This would be a great solution to keep track of orders that are on backorder etc to remind customer service to look at the order for updates and notify the csutoemr accordingly.


Anyone have any clue and how to create a workflow like this?

I dunno. I would imagine it would. I will have to place a test order, update it and then check the database unless someone knows...

It would be nice for survey emails to go out as well. ie. 10 days after an order ships, an email (using a new template) is sent out to touch base with the customer, provide a survey link etc. Great for getting repeat business, as well as reminding my own customer service that an order needs attention if its left un-touch for X amount of days. :)

There is a LastUpdated column in the bvc_Order table. When you edit an order and save it the date changes. Under what conditions are you looking for this date to change?

If I change the Order Status LastUpdated is changed as well.

Where would you put this workflow task? When would it run?

Sounds like it would have the potential of slowing things down a little on a live website. Unless you ran it in another thread.
I run task similar to this but generally approach it using a scheduled task on the server. You would need to be using a dedi server though to use this method. I do because some of them take an extended time to complete.

All seems to be in place for what you need. Just need to write the code.

Performance wise, it would be nice to see a batch run on this during off hours. The concept is sound though. I didn't realize that LastUpdated would increment based on just a status change, but that's cool. You would have two different dates to work from. You could have the stagnate timeout, based on lastupdated in the DB, but you could also utilitize the timestamp for date shipped to run a follow-up routine.

One little drawback... the lastupdated field controls the whole order, not just the order status. For example, an order may not have had an updated for 2 weeks, but someone has put notes on the order yesterday. This may cause logic confusion somewhere down the line.

We are working on a similar workflow idea for just the followup after shipping. Although, because of the mass amount of emails we expect, we are generating a report of email address and info to be used with something like ConstantContact or CampaignMonitor.