D13OPERATIONS

Order and ticket triage / routing

Sits between an inbound stream of work items — orders, service tickets, requests, repair jobs — and the teams that handle them. For each item, the pattern reads the content, classifies it against the firm's working categories, predicts urgency and skill required, identifies any special handling needed (VIP customer, regulatory case, known-difficult product), and assigns to the right queue or person. The pattern's value is taking the manual triage step — usually done by a dispatcher or team lead — and making it instant and consistent. Different from A6 (which triages messages) because this pattern handles operational work items that drive downstream activity, not just communication.

WHERE THIS FITS

BUSINESS SHAPES

B2B servicesProduct companyMarketplace / two-sided

VOLUME THRESHOLD

Below 30 work items per day a month, the payback rarely earns the build. Patterns this shape reliably pay back at 200+.

FITS BEST

Any firm with high-volume incoming work currently human-routed.

PAYBACK · 4-6 moBUILD · Low-MediumVALUE · $35k-$130kWHEN · >500 items/wk

FAILURE MODE TO DESIGN AROUND

Edge cases drift into "other" indefinitely → quarterly review of the other-bucket is mandatory.

REQUIREMENTS · 5 REQUIRED, 1 OPTIONAL

Requirements describe capabilities the pattern needs in your environment, not the vendors you must buy. Any system that fills a requirement satisfies it — that’s what makes the catalog portable across the long tail of SMB tooling.

work_item_intake
REQUIREDREADevent
Stream of incoming work items the pattern triages.
DATA SHAPE
Work item records: content, customer or requester identifier, source channel, timestamp, any structured fields already captured at intake.
COMMONLY FILLED BY
- order management system feeding new orders
- ticket queue receiving service requests
- intake form submissions
- scheduling system with pending jobs
routing_taxonomy
REQUIREDREADcorpus
The categories, queues, and assignment rules the firm operates by. Specific to the client.
DATA SHAPE
Hierarchical categories with descriptions, routing rules per category, urgency definitions, skill mappings, escalation triggers.
COMMONLY FILLED BY
- configuration maintained by operations leadership
- small admin UI inside the pattern
- rules table maintained by the dispatch team
customer_or_requester_context
REQUIREDREADrequest
Information about who's sending the work in. VIP status, known issues, contract terms, history with the firm.
DATA SHAPE
Per-requester records with relationship type, account flags, recent activity, contract terms.
COMMONLY FILLED BY
- CRM with customer profiles
- ERP with customer account records
- service contract database
team_capacity_signal
RECOMMENDEDREADrequest
Who's available, what their current load is, what skills they have. Lets routing balance load rather than just routing by category.
DATA SHAPE
Per-team and per-person availability, current open items, skill tags, working hours.
IF MISSING
Pattern routes by category only, ignoring load. Works reasonably but creates queue imbalance and degrades response times.
COMMONLY FILLED BY
- workforce management system
- live dashboard of team workloads
- scheduling system with availability
routing_destination
REQUIREDWRITEevent
Where triaged work items land, in the team's normal working surface.
DATA SHAPE
Work item with assigned queue or owner, urgency flag, classification, any special-handling notes.
COMMONLY FILLED BY
- assigned ticket in the helpdesk or service tool
- queued job in the dispatch system
- task assigned in the project management tool
misroute_feedback_loop
REQUIREDWRITEevent
How the team flags incorrect routing back so the pattern learns. Without this, routing accuracy plateaus and drifts.
DATA SHAPE
Per-item: actual final routing vs. predicted, time elapsed before correction, reason for misroute.
COMMONLY FILLED BY
- reassignment events captured from the destination system
- feedback widget in the work item view
- weekly review process flagging misroutes

RUNTIME FLOW · 6 STEPS

01
New work item arrives on the intake stream
work_item_intake
02
Fetch context about the requester to inform classification
customer_or_requester_context
03
Classify against the routing taxonomy: category, urgency, skill needed, special handling flags
routing_taxonomy
04
If team capacity signal is filled, consider current load and skill availability in routing decision
team_capacity_signal
DECISION Skip load-balancing logic if signal not available.
05
Assign to the right queue or individual; write to routing destination with all flags and classifications
routing_destination
06
Watch for reassignments or corrections, capture as misroute feedback
misroute_feedback_loop

EMISSIONS · 3

Structured outputs this pattern produces. Other patterns and client systems can subscribe to them, which is how the catalog composes over time.

triage_accuracy_signal
Routing accuracy by category and over time. The metric that tells you whether the pattern is helping.
CONSUMED BY
- operations quality dashboards
- monthly review
- taxonomy refinement
queue_load_signal
Per-queue and per-team work item flow with classifications.
CONSUMED BY
- capacity planning
- operations leadership reviews
- workforce management
category_drift_signal
Items that classify poorly or fall outside existing categories, surfaced as candidates for taxonomy revision.
CONSUMED BY
- taxonomy maintenance
- quarterly operations review