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Administering Bricks

A brick is a collection of accounts and contacts, normally in a common geographic area. Bricks are sometimes referred to as geo zones. The primary purpose of a brick is to allow a company to publish RSA (retail sales analysis) data while making sure that specific sales cannot be tracked to a particular contact or account.

IMS Health publishes retail sales data and determines the definition of bricks. Brick definitions are reviewed every six months and adjusted to make sure that the brick is as small as possible while providing the required level of anonymity.

Because brick data is a key measure of return on a pharmaceutical company's investment in sales promotion, outside the United States most pharmaceutical companies build sales territories based on brick data available for that country. This provides a meaningful way to measure performance over time.

About Bricks in Siebel Pharma

As Siebel administrator, you can associate a contact or an account address with a brick. A contact can be associated with multiple bricks and an account with multiple addresses can have one brick for each address.

Siebel Pharma also supports mini-bricks. Mini-brick data is a subset of brick data that narrows the number of contacts and accounts in a geographic area. Mini-bricks provide a more detailed view of an area, without identifying the individuals in the unit.

It is the Siebel administrator's responsibility to set up and maintain brick definitions as well as associate bricks with contacts and account addresses. For information on associating a brick with an account address, see Associating a Brick with an Account Address.

Defining a Brick

To define a brick

1. Navigate to the Data Administration screen > Brick Details view.
2. In the Bricks list, create a new record and complete the necessary fields.

   Some fields are described in the following table.

   Field	Comments
   Parent Brick	The Pick Brick dialog box lists all the bricks in the database. If the new brick is a mini-brick, click the parent brick in the Pick Brick dialog box.
   Active	If checked, the brick is active. Only active bricks are listed in the Pick Brick dialog box.
   Position	Defines positions associated with the brick and controls visibility on the Analysis screen > Brick views. Note: For users to see the bricks for which they are responsible, the administrator must associate their position with those bricks.

NOTE:  On initial data load, you can use EIM to load brick data into the base table S_REGION. For more information on using EIM, see Siebel Enterprise Integration Manager Administration Guide.

Associating a Contact with a Brick

You can associate a brick directly with one or more contacts.

To associate a contact with a brick

1. Navigate to the Data Administration screen > Brick Details view.
2. In the Bricks list, select a Brick.
3. In the Contact list, create a new record for the contact you want to associate with the brick.