Siebel Assignment Manager Administration Guide > Overview of Siebel Assignment Manager >

Assignment Concepts

Siebel Assignment Manager routes business entities and work items to the most appropriate candidates by enforcing business rules set by sales, service, and marketing organizations. Assignment Manager does this by matching candidates (that is, employees, positions, and organizations) to predefined and user-configurable assignment objects. To assign the most qualified candidate to each object, Assignment Manager applies assignment rules that you define to each candidate.

To define assignment rules, you select:

• Objects to which each assignment rule applies.
• Rule groups to which each assignment rule belongs.
• Candidates for each assignment rule. Candidates may be persons (employees or positions), organizations, or both.
• Criteria for each assignment rule.
• (Optional) Values for assignment criteria.

For rules that match attributes of an assignment object with attributes of candidates, you can optionally define:

• Skills to match assignment rules to candidate attributes.

  A skill is a generic row-level attribute that qualifies a person, organization, or assignment object row. 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 skills on the object with the skills of an employee, position, or organization to determine if they pass the rule.

• Expertise levels to weigh skill scores (to measure competency in a certain area for each candidate).
• Scores for each assignment rule, criterion, and value and a personal score for each individual candidate.

  For example:

  • In a sales organization, you can create an assignment rule that scores positions (candidates) based on territory definitions (criteria) for an opportunity (object).
  • In a service organization, you can create an assignment rule that scores employees (candidates) based on product expertise (criteria) for a service request or product defect (object).

    Using the sum of scores at the assignment rule level, Assignment Manager assigns the best candidate for each rule and the best candidates for the object.

• Defining workload distribution rules to balance work among the candidates.

  Define workload distribution rules if you want to distribute the workload rules evenly between the candidates or if your business logic includes limits on the maximum amount of work that can be handled at one time.

You can also customize the way Assignment Manager makes assignments by:

• Defining how attributes are matched by:
  • Using different comparison methods
  • Making criteria required (compulsory) or optional
  • Using inclusion and exclusion methods
  • Using workload distribution rules
  • Using wildcard values
• Defining how assignment rules are matched by using:
  • Assignment rule groups
  • Assignment rule sequencing
• Defining how candidates are assigned based on person and organization relationships using multitiered assignment.
• Creating and configuring your own entities, including:
  • Assignment objects
  • Assignment criteria
  • Assignment attributes
  • Workload distribution rules to make assignments based on current workload
  • Dynamic candidates and candidate teams that are assigned dynamically depending on the object row assigned
• Running Assignment Manager in different operating modes to process assignments:
  • Interactively in real time
  • Dynamically when object rows are created or attributes on object rows are changed by connected or mobile users
  • Periodically assigning objects in batches
• Running Assignment Manager against reporting tables to test the desired behavior of assignment rules and rule groups before running against production tables.
• Checking availability before assigning employees to objects.
• Defining which servers are used to run selected groups of rules.
• Delegating the task of creating business logic through rules and criteria to others.

Summary of Assignment Manager Customization Tasks

Table 4 summarizes the Assignment Manager customization tasks and where you can find more information.