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About Assignment Skills, Expertise Codes, and Weighting Factors

Assignment Manager provides predefined skills, expertise codes, and weighting factors. These optional building blocks allow you to determine the criteria that you want to evaluate for each candidate to make sure potential candidates possess the proper skillset to handle the task.

Assignment Skills

A skill is an attribute associated with a person, organization, or base table row. Assignment Manager can perform assignments based on skills by associating the skills with employee, position, and organization candidates. For example, if an employee speaks English and Spanish, language is the skill he or she possesses, and English and Spanish are the skill items. Employee, position, and organization skills are used to store skills possessed; the skill tables for objects are used to store skills required. Assignment Manager uses skill tables to do skill matching by comparing the skills on the object with the skills of an employee, position, or organization to determine who passes the rule.

The Siebel application provides predefined skills, however, you can create new skills using Siebel Tools. You enable and configure skills at the criteria level using Siebel Tools. After skills are enabled, Assignment Manager matches skills based on the assignment criteria comparison method in the same manner in which other attributes are matched. Assignment Manager applies scores and other filters to find the best candidate after a match is made.

Expertise Codes

Expertise codes define an employee's expertise level for a particular skill item. For example, an employee might have an Expert level expertise in networking products but only a Novice level expertise in printer products. You apply expertise codes to skills to eliminate underqualified candidates. Assignment Manager uses expertise codes to match an assignment object to people.

After you select an expertise code for a skill, Assignment Manager matches assignment rules based on the assignment criteria comparison method. Table 24 shows the different results based on those methods.

For more information about assignment criteria comparison methods, see Assignment Criteria Comparison Methods.

Weighting Factors

Optionally, you can apply weighting factors to expertise codes. While you can use expertise codes to eliminate underqualified candidates, using weighted expertise codes allows you to weigh skill scores to find the most suitable candidate by further eliminating overqualified candidates. For example, you may not want to assign an expert to a service request that can be handled by a novice.

Using weighted expertise codes allows you to prevent assigning objects to overqualified candidates by applying a weight to the skill score. Each expertise code has a defined value, which is its weighting factor. The expertise code with the highest defined weighting factor represents the maximum weighting factor (Max Weighting Factor).

The weighting applied to a skill or criteria score is the percentage defined by an expertise code's weighting factor over the maximum weighting factor. For an example, see Table 25.

Weighted scores are calculated differently based on the comparison method chosen for the assignment rule:

• For the Compare to Person, Compare to Object, and Compare to Organization comparison methods, the weighted score is determined as follows:

  Score = Criteria Score + Skill Score*(Weighting Factor/Max Weighting Factor)

• For the Compare Object to Person and Compare Object to Organization comparison methods, because neither of these comparison methods can define skill scores, the weighted score is determined as follows:

  Score = Criteria Score*(Weighting Factor/Max Weighting Factor)

  NOTE:  When using the Compare Object to Person or the Compare Object to Organization comparison method, weighting factors are only applied if the expertise code is defined for both the object assignment skill item and the candidate skill item. If the expertise code is not defined for both, the weighting factors are excluded.

Assignment Manager applies the weighted skill scores and other scores to find the most suitable candidate when a match is made.

Related Topics

Process of Defining Criteria Values as Skills with Expertise Codes and Weighting Factors

Scenario for Using Assignment Skills

Example of Using Assignment Skills in Assignment Rules