Bookshelf v7.5: Candidates

In Siebel Assignment Manager, candidates represent the people who are evaluated as potential assignees for objects. Depending on the assignment rule you use, and the object to which a candidate is assigned, candidates can be positions, employees, or organizations, and can be assigned as individuals or as members of a team. For information about the predefined assignment objects and recommended candidate assignments, see Table 3.

Positions

Positions represent candidates distinguished by their job functions, and are typically used as candidates in sales organizations. For example, a sales organization would want to assign positions to objects, because these positions are responsible for a region or territory.

By assigning objects to positions, you can have one sales representative inherit the opportunities, accounts, and contacts from another representative by reassigning the employee responsible for a specific position.

Employees

Employees represent candidates distinguished by their skills and product expertise, and are typically used as candidates in service organizations. For example, a service organization would want to assign employees with the proper skills and expertise to objects, because these employees possess specific skills that are related to the service request or activity. Assignment Manager can also take into account a specific employee's work schedule, calendar, and regional schedule when determining assignments by creating rules based on an employee's availability.

Organizations

An organization represents a group of positions that has limited visibility to particular application data. For example, your company can create separate and distinct organizations to distribute specific information to organizational groups both inside and outside of your enterprise. Both internal and external users are granted access only to the information that they should see (such as accounts, opportunities, and contacts) and data they need to see (such as price lists, products, and literature).

By assigning objects to organizations, you can maintain better security and promote proper business practices by controlling data access and visibility between different organizations. For example, you can limit your distributors' data access by giving them visibility to product information, but restrict their visibility to price lists for the products. To do this, you can create a separate organization for your distributors that does not have access to the price list data. In this case, the price lists are not available to your distributors even if they are assigned to the products.

Some objects allow the assignment of a single organization, whereas other objects allow the assignment of multiple organizations to the same object. For more information, see Table 3.

Teams

A team represents a group of employees or positions. Assigning a team allows you to assign a group of individuals that possess various skills or job functions to a particular object.

In sales organizations, teams are typically assigned to objects. For example, you can assign a sales representative and a sales consultant to an opportunity. Or you can can assign a team of sales professionals—two district representatives, a regional manager, and a sales engineer—to work a single, large sales opportunity.

Individuals

An individual represents a single employee or a position. Assigning individuals allows you to assign exclusive ownership to an individual who possesses a specific skill or expertise for a particular object.

In service organizations, individuals are typically assigned to objects. For example, you can assign a customer service representative with expertise in disk drives to all service requests that are marked for this area.

Table 3 shows which candidates can be assigned to each of the predefined assignment objects. This table also shows which assignment objects are restricted to a single assignee, and assignment objects that are capable of incorporating a team of assignees. S indicates the ability to allow only a single owner or assignment; M indicates the ability to allow multiple owners or team assignments.

Table 3. Summary of Predefined Assignment Objects
	Candidate
Assignment Object	Position	Employee	Organization
Account	M		M
Activity		S
Campaign	M		M
Campaign Contact	S		S
Contact	M		M
Opportunity	M		M
Product Defect		S
Project		M	M
Project Team		M
Service Request		S	M

If you need to modify the default properties—for example, if you want to assign Accounts to Employees—you can do so by configuring the assignment object properties using Siebel Tools. For more details, see Assignment Object Configuration.

Primaries

A primary on an assignment rule represents the candidate (employee, position, or organization) that is assigned as the primary owner of the assignment object if the candidate passes the criteria for that object. The primary is the main or first owner of an assignment object. For assignments that allow only single assignees, the single assignee becomes the primary assignee as well.