What is the Impact Cascade Engine?
The Impact Cascade Engine is BFF’s change-control system for controlled documents. When a Policy, SOP, Work Instruction, or Training document is published — or republished with changes — the engine runs Change Impact Analysis so nothing downstream is silently left following an outdated version.
The engine is feature-flag gated (cascade_engine). If you don’t see the Alerts page under the sidebar’s Pings group, the flag isn’t enabled for your company.
What Triggers a Cascade?
One thing, and one thing only: publishing a controlled document. The old event triggers (task updates, task deletions, user deactivations) no longer exist — change control is now driven entirely by the document lifecycle.
| You publish… | Change Impact Analysis runs on… |
|---|---|
| A Policy | Every document linked to it (e.g., SOPs that implement it) |
| An SOP | Linked Policies above it and Work Instructions below it |
| A Work Instruction | Linked SOPs, Training, and any other connected documents |
| A Training document | The documents it trains on |
How Change Impact Analysis Works
- You publish (or republish) a controlled document
- The engine walks the document’s dependency-link graph in both directions — upstream and downstream (see Linking Documents into the Governance Graph)
- For each connected document, it creates an Impact Cascade Alert addressed to that document’s Owner
- Each alert includes an AI-generated explanation of what changed and why it matters to the linked document
Because the walk is bidirectional, publishing an SOP can flag both the Policy it implements (does the rule still hold?) and the Work Instructions beneath it (do the steps still match?).
Who Else Gets Notified
A republish doesn’t stop at document owners:
| Audience | What they receive |
|---|---|
| Owners of linked documents | An Impact Cascade Alert with AI analysis |
| Assignees of tasks linked to the document | A Document Changed notification |
| Readers with stale acknowledgements | A Re-ack Required notification — acknowledgements are version-scoped, so a republish makes prior sign-offs stale (see Completing Your Required Reading) |
| Linked AI agents | A webhook, with the notice routed to the agent’s responsible human |
Why It Matters
In most tools, updating a policy changes a page and nothing else — people keep working from the old version. In BFF, every publish flows through the governance graph: owners review their affected documents, task assignees see what changed, and readers re-sign the new version.
Tip: The engine can only trace what’s linked. A document with no links is invisible to impact analysis — build your graph first, then let publishing do the rest.