This chapter covers the following topics:
Programs are used to segment partners and provide them with different benefits. You can create programs for existing partners as well as new partners. You can also recruit and maintain partners with specific incentive packages. This helps increase and maintain a strong partner community that further helps you to increase overall market share and revenues.
You can customize programs to recruit new partners and motivate existing partners. Programs can be created for groups of partner types, for example, Resellers, Value Added Resellers (VAR), Distributors, and so on.
This section describes the processes for creating and approving partner programs and discusses program characteristics.
You can create programs that provide valuable information, incentives, and promotions to a wide partner community. You must be logged in with the channel manager responsibility. On the Partner Programs page, create a new program and enter program parameters. When finished, submit the program for approval.
Program Type
Program Type refers to the type of program that is set up by the administrator with the approvers hierarchy already set up. This helps the program to be routed for approvals automatically.
Program Level
If Program is selected and the person creating the program is the same as the program owner, the program gets approved.
If Membership l is selected, the Membership Fee Required, Membership Duration, Enable VAD Initiated Invitation and Require Global Membership fields are activated.
Start Date and End Date
The start and end dates are defaulted to parent programs dates respectively. Users can still choose a start and end date in between the partners' start and end date.
You can create a program in one step by copying an existing program. To copy a program, log in as a channel administrator and navigate to Partner Programs > Partner Programs page. Select a program and attributes to copy.
Channel managers are responsible for creating partner programs. When a program is created, it must be approved by valid individual(s) within your organization before a partner can enroll in it. Approvers are specified by the channel administrator when she sets up the program type criteria. Approvers can be designated by a user name or role. They receive either an e-mail or notification alerting them to review programs and approve them. When you submit a program for approval, a notification is sent to the approver associated with the program type. A sequence is associated with approvers to route program approval requests sequentially.
When a program is created, the program status is initially set to New which is the default value.
When a program is created at the Program level and submitted for approval and if the person creating the program and the program owner are the same, the program gets approved. The status of the program changes to Approved. The program can be activated, after which the status of the program changes to Active.
If the person creating the program and the program owner are not the same, the program approver receives a notification indicating that the program is awaiting his approval. To approve the program, the approver should have the responsibility Workflow User Web Application.
When a program is created at the Membership level, you must mention whether a membership fee is required and the duration of the membership. At this level, you can also decide if distributors can invite partners to enroll in the program and if a subsidiary partner requires a global membership, to be able to enroll in the program.
When a program is in the Active status, it is available for partner enrollment.
After creating a program, you must define characteristics such as requirements, pricing, legal terms, and payment terms.
Benefits
You can organize and offer specific benefits to partners. Benefits such as sales opportunities, product information, marketing collateral, services, and training can be grouped within a program. Program benefits do not become available to partner users until they enroll in the program and their enrollment is approved.
You can associate numerous benefits with a program:
Referrals: A partner refers business to the vendor and receives compensated if the referral results in closed business.
Deal Registrations: A partner registers a deal with the vendor for noncompetition purposes.
Special Pricing Requests: A partner requests discounts for newly purchased inventory or to move existing inventory.
Fund Requests: A partner can request funding to carry out certain marketing activities.
Requirements evaluate the partner's enrollment. You can view whether the partner enrolling has either passed or failed the base criterion that is set for the program.
Some organizations require their partners to meet certain prerequisites before they can enroll into certain programs. You can define prerequisites that a partner must meet, to be eligible to enroll into a given program. Partner program memberships can be setup as prerequisites for joining another program. Terminated or expired prerequisite memberships terminate or expire any memberships that are dependent upon them.
If you specify that a requirement is mandatory, the program is available only to partners that meet the requirement. If a requirement is not mandatory, partners have the opportunity to enroll in the program and the channel manager can then approve or deny the enrollment.
A price is defined by associating a program with a price list. Different price lists can be associated to a program using the Pricing & Payments side navigation link. The side navigation link appears only if you selected the Membership Fee Required check box while creating the program.
You can define multiple prices by associating a program with multiple price lists. You must define the price list precedence so the appropriate price is selected. Price lists use the multi currency feature of Oracle Advanced Pricing to select the appropriate price. For more information, see the Oracle Advanced Pricing User Guide
After a price list is created in Oracle Advanced Pricing, you can associate it with a specified currency and enter start and end dates for the price list.
You can associate inventory items with partner programs and price these items. The PV: Enable Auto Creation of Inventory Items option determines whether inventory items are created automatically or manually. Set this option at the Site level. When the profile option is set to Yes, autocreation is enabled, and an inventory item is created automatically for each partner program with a fee. When set to No, autocreation is disabled. In this case, when you create a new program with a fee, you must select an inventory item from the LOV for the program. The inventory items are created and managed through the Oracle Inventory application.
You add inventory items to the program using the Inventory Item list box. The items available for selection are defined by profile options, Oracle Inventory security definitions, and inventory item attributes. You cannot change the price on these pre-existing inventory items in Oracle Partner Management (PRM); however, if autocreation is turned off you can make the price change from within Advanced Pricing. After you activate a program and it has accepted enrollments, you cannot change the inventory items associated with the program.
If the program requires a fee and you manually select an inventory item that does not have pricing information set up, you can still create the program and submit it for approval. However, you cannot activate the program until pricing is created for the program inventory item.
Oracle Partner Management uses Oracle Contracts to store and manage partner contracts. Oracle Partner Management integrates with Oracle Contracts to provide the terms and conditions that can be associated with membership in a partner program. For a contract to be available in Oracle Partner Management, you must create a contract template under the 'Partner Contracts' category and attach it to a program. When a partner's enrollment is approved, a new contract is automatically created from the template. The contract is presented in the session language for the logged in partner user; however partners can view the contract in another language.
Integration with Contracts Core provides Partner Management with a repository, or library, of contract templates and clauses. Clauses can be associated with one or more contract templates. Contracts provide a contract and clause approval mechanism, through Oracle Workflow Builder, that allows the customer to better control the content of terms and conditions.
The delivered contract response options are Accept, Reject, and Print and Fax. You can configure the contract responses at a global or geographic level to meet business needs; for example, to allow only online contract acceptance, you can disable the Print and Fax option. Reject must always be an option and is not configurable.
Partner Management lets you specify the contract response rules based on partner geography. Integration with Oracle Contracts provides numerous benefits for Partner Management customers. For example, a clause can be associated with more than one contract, which greatly reduces the amount of time spent by a contract administrator entering and subsequently maintaining terms and conditions. In addition, customers gain increased flexibility in how they can build templates, as they can add, remove, and rearrange clauses easily. The Contracts integration also gives customers the ability to create localized versions of a contract. This is an important enhancement for customers who are bound by legal regulations to provide partners with contracts in their own languages.
For example, in Canada, a vendor must be able to provide its partners with partner program terms and conditions in either English or French. Similarly, contract response options can also be governed by local or regional regulations, and allowing customers to create geographic-based contract response options provides them with the ability to comply with these regulations.
For information on how to create a new contract template, see Setting Up Contracts in the Oracle Partner Management Implementation Guide.
You can create questions that partners may or may not have to answer (you can specify if it is mandatory for a partner to answer a question) while enrolling into a program. You can also enter additional information like title, header or footer information.
The enrollment questionnaire is linked to the enrollment of the program. During the enrollment process, answers entered by a partner are populated based on the profile attributes associated with a question. For example, if a partner already has profile attribute values for 'Number of Employees' within the system, the question is pre-populated with the existing value during enrollment.
You can also define the Program Overview page here. This page is customizable and can include images and formatted text to present program overview information to enrolling partners.
You can create a summary of the program, which reflects details of a program. The summary is HTML content that is displayed to partners to help them understand program requirements, benefits, and so on. The summary can be the setup type, name, program start and end dates, owner, partner type, country, language, and description. The program summary information is stored in the Oracle Content Management application. Oracle Content Management and Oracle Partner Management are integrated so that the program summary information created in Oracle Partner Management is stored in Oracle Content Management; channel managers do not need to access Oracle Content Management directly.
Program summary can be set up by navigating to the enrollment questionnaire and clicking the Program Overview button.
You can create a task list that an approver must complete before approving an enrollment request. A task is any process that the approver is needed to complete before approving the enrollment request for a program. Approvers can view the list of 'To Do' items before approving or rejecting a potential partner into a program. A setting can be flagged for the approver to review and complete all items on the task list before an enrollment is approved. It is mandatory for approvers to check all tasks before they are able to approve the enrollment request. This is mandatory only when the check box Do Not Allow Enrollment Approval Before Completion of Task is selected.
Upgrade rules allow a membership to be upgraded from one program to another. A membership program can be upgraded to a higher level to provide more benefits to partners.
Notifications contain messages that can request users to take some action and/or provide users with information. Different types of notifications are attached to a program. Notifications are configured at the 'membership' level, under the Notifications side navigation link.
You can send notifications as e-mail messages if the notification preference is set to Plain text mail, HTML mail, or Plain text mail with attachments in the Preferences page. The Oracle Workflow administrator sets up the Notification Mailer concurrent program to run. Some notifications are generated on the fly with the triggering of some event, and some are generated by the execution of some concurrent requests.
Notification alerts are triggered when specified events occur within a partner's enrollment term. Certain alerts can be configurable variables such as number of days associated with them. Vendors can specify values for the variables. The alerts are triggered when the values are not met.
All notifications are linked to specific e-mail messages that are configured in the Oracle Workflow Framework. When events are triggered, Oracle Partner Management initiates the respective e-mail within Oracle Workflow. The partner's e-mail address is provided in the e-mail message. For time based notifications, Oracle Partner Management has daily batch programs to analyze notifications to be executed. The frequency of batch programs is configurable.
The different notifications are:
Thank You Notification: When a partner successfully enrolls into a program, this notification is generated by Oracle Partner Management. This notification is generated after a partner successfully enrolls into a program.
Welcome Notification: When a partner requests for enrollment into a program, the approver in the vendor organization takes action on the enrollment request, either by approving it or rejecting it. If the approver approves the enrollment request, the requestor receives a welcome notification.
Rejection Notification: When a partner's request for enrollment into a program is rejected by the approver, the requestor gets a rejection notification.
Contract Not Received Notification: You can set the number of days/weeks/months within which if a contract is not received, a notification is triggered. When partner users successfully enroll into a program, they have to submit a signed copy of a contract for the program. If the signed copy is not received within the specified time limit, the enrollment system sends a notification to the partner user. The system repeats the notification until the signed copy of contract is received. This is managed by the execution of a daily scheduled concurrent request program in a batch mode. In these type of notifications, the repetition depends upon the notification rule set for the program.
Membership Renewal Notification: You can set the number of days/weeks/months within which if a membership expires, a notification is triggered. When an enrollment is going to expire, Oracle Partner Management sends this notification to partners. This notification is also managed by the execution of a daily scheduled concurrent request program in a batch mode.
The list of enrolled partners, under the Tracking menu, enables you to view information for enrolled partners such as contact, program status, and start and end dates. You can select one or more partners and issue an offer to change their membership level.
Partners are notified if they have an offer to upgrade or downgrade from one program or membership level to another, for enrollment. Partners are also notified when they are invited to enroll into a new program. You can select all partners for a specified program and upgrade, downgrade, terminate or send new invitations within the same program. Sending a notification to a partner for the Upgrade, Downgrade, Terminate, New Invites process, depends upon the 'Do Not Send Message to Partner(s)' check box value.
To forcefully terminate an enrolled partner from a given membership level program, select a reason for termination. A message is stored in the history log, and the partner and contract are terminated immediately. Primary users in the partner organization are informed of the termination.
You can forcefully downgrade a list of selected partners from one level program to another as per downgrade rules. You can edit a message to be sent to the partner using the workflow engine. Notifications are sent to partners regarding this action.
The partner is downgraded with immediate effect. The partner's current membership ends and the partner is automatically enrolled into the new program. The contract is also upgraded to this new program.
You can upgrade a partner's enrollment into a program to a new membership level program as per upgrade rules. You can select a program or membership level program to upgrade a partner, and then edit a message to be sent to the partner(s). You can also extend a discount amount or percentage for their enrollment fees.
The Invite New Partner to Partner Login to Partner Enrollment Flow involves the following steps:
Invite New Partner
Partner Login
Partner Enrollment
You can invite a partner to join a program. The channel manager or channel representative can invite new partners for enrollment in a program. The channel manager captures basic information about the partner organization including address details, partner contact details and program related information when inviting them to join a program.
You can attach discounts to invitations, either to the enrollment fee of the program or membership level program. The discount can be an amount value or percentage off the enrollment fee.
After the partner receives a notification, they can view the program overview and decide to enroll in the program and thus get a membership in the program.
The partner can enroll in the program through the Available Programs Bin or can enroll into programs that have been initiated by a distributor. During the enrollment process, the partner can review the contract template attached to a program and agree or disagree with the contract. They can also choose to print and fax or mail a signed copy of the contract later, and continue with the enrollment process.
You can add team members to a partner program. Expand the Collaboration menu, enter the team members, and select a User/Role for each team member. Available options for User/Role are User and Team.