This chapter covers the following topics:
Implementing Oracle Partner Management involves setting up and integrating with various other Oracle applications. Some of the prerequisite set ups are necessary to provide basic functionality. Other optional set ups allow you to extend the functionality and capabilities of the Oracle Partner Management application.
Set ups that are required for Oracle Partner Management to function properly are called mandatory prerequisites. This chapter describes these requirements and provides some information to help you set up and implement them properly. For more thorough information on setting up the mandatory prerequisites, you will need to refer to other documentation.
Optional integrations refer to other Oracle applications that Oracle Partner Management relies upon for additional functionality. Which applications you need to integrate with depends upon which feature of Oracle Partner Management you implement.
An Oracle Partner Management implementation depends upon a number of other Oracle applications to provide things such as an organizational structure, creation and management of employees and other resources, support for multiple currencies and languages, accounting and inventory functions.
If you are implementing Oracle Partner Management as part of a larger Oracle HRMS or CRM implementation, many of the prerequisites will be set up already. If you are implementing Oracle Partner Management standalone, you will need to implement the feature or applications described in this section. You should complete the set up procedures discussed in this section before implementing Oracle Partner Management.
Part of implementing Oracle applications involves setting up a virtual model of your enterprise in the Oracle Human Resources Management System (HRMS). Oracle applications uses the term “organization” to refer to the various business units that make up an enterprise, and the model of the enterprise in HRMS is referred to as the “organizational structure.” A business can support multiple organizations running any Oracle applications product with a single installation. When you run any Oracle Applications product, you first choose an organization, either implicitly by choosing a responsibility or explicitly in a choose Organization window. Each window and report then displays information for the selected organization only.
Each organizational structure contains one Business Group. The business group is the largest organizational unit representing the enterprise. A business group may correspond to a company or corporation, or in large enterprises, a holding or parent company. It can be an organization with a physical location, or it may be an abstract representation of a legal entity that employs people assigned to work in organizations beneath it.
Depending on business requirements, your organizational structure can contain one or more Set of Books, and various organizations, such as operating units, legal entities, and inventory organizations.
If you are implementing Oracle Partner Management as a standalone application, you will need to create an organizational structure. Most of the organizational structure is set up through HRMS. (An exception is the Set of Books, which is set up through the Oracle General Ledger application.) For more information on using HRMS, refer to the guide Using Oracle HRMS - The Fundamentals. For complete information about modeling, implementing, and managing your organizational structure in Oracle Applications, refer to the Oracle Applications Multiple Organizations Implementation Guide.
An internal organization is needed for partner creation, as it allows a "partner of" relationship to be created for each partner that is added to the database. At least one internal organization must be set up for an Oracle Partner Management implementation, and then the profile option PV: Default Vendor Organization must be populated with the name of the internal organization. If only one internal organization is set up for an implementation, the profile option is set at the application or site level. If more than one internal organization is set up, the profile option must be set at the responsibility level for the default partner responsibility. The internal organization information must be set up before partners can successfully self-register. It is also required for the Customer to Partner conversion.
Internal organizations are created through the Oracle TeleSales eBusiness Center application. One of the following responsibilities is required to set up an internal organization:
TeleSales Agent
TeleSales Manager
Telemarketing Agent
For information on creating an internal organization, refer to the Oracle TeleSales Implementation Guide.
Oracle CRM Technology Foundation provides a common infrastructure on which all CRM applications are built. By providing a set of application components, CRM Foundation ensures that all applications interact with key business objects in a consistent manner.
For detailed information about Oracle CRM Foundation see, Oracle CRM Application Foundation Implementation Guide.
Resource Manager is mandatory for an Oracle Partner Management implementation. This component enables you to use application resources regardless of where they are created. Resource manager serves as a central repository for resources, resource groups, teams, and roles.
Resources such as employees, suppliers, parties, or partners, that have been created in other applications can be imported into Resource Manager. Once imported, the resource becomes available for CRM applications.
Oracle Partner Management uses newly created and imported resources with the Channel Manager or Channel Rep role as members of the Channel team.
Task Manager is mandatory for an Oracle Partner Management implementation. It provides a mechanism for your application to respond to customer needs in a timely manner by creating and distributing work assignments (such as appointments, callback requests, and service requests) to individuals.
If you are using e-mail, fax, print schedules, e-mail notifications (or if you are using the features of e-mail notifications on fulfillment rules) Oracle 1-to-1 Fulfillment is a mandatory setup. The fulfillment engine supports high volume electronic fulfillment of documents.
A note is free-form text attached to an object that records descriptive information about business transactions and that can be referenced across modules. Notes can be created by both vendor and partner users.
Notes can be further defined by setting up note types. A note type is used to classify notes, such as general note type or interaction note type. In addition to the seeded note types, additional note types can be created during implementation to further categorize notes, if necessary.
Oracle Notes comes with a set of predefined note types; optionally, you can create additional note types and map note types to a source. Refer to Setting up Notes for more information about implementing Oracle Notes for use with Oracle Partner Management.
Territory Manager provides an infrastructure to define territories based on flexible criteria, such as geography, zip code, area code. This engine creates automatic assignment of transactions across the entire CRM suite.
Territory Manager is required for the channel manager dashboard since channel teams are populated based on territory assignment. Territory Manager is also required for referrals and deal registration, and is used to identify the country or countries to which the referral or deal benefit is applicable. It is also needed for opportunities and leads. Refer to Setting up Territories in Oracle Territory Management for more information about creating Territories for use with Oracle Partner Management.
Note: You must create a territory with the Oracle Partner Management usage to populate channel teams. If you are implementing referrals or deal registration, you must also set up a second territory with the Oracle Trade Management usage, transaction type Offer (if it has not been created already for the Oracle Trade Management application).
Implementing Assignment Manager is optional. The Assignment engine determines the best resource to be assigned to tasks based on availability and skill set. This engine is used by the various CRM modules to automatically assign tasks to a resource or a group of people.
Oracle Applications Object Library (AOL) provides some of the underlying support structures and features that are used by all Oracle applications. AOL provides the following:
Multiple-currency support.
Multiple-language support.
Creation of responsibilities and association of responsibilities with users
Creation of menus and the association of menus with responsibilities. - AOL
Creation of users and user names - The ability to create users is provided by AOL. A user must have a user name, and the user must be assigned at least one responsibility.
For more information see, Oracle Applications Concepts and Oracle Applications System Administrator's Guide.
Basic accounting information for Oracle Partner Management is provided by Oracle General Ledger (GL). Because Oracle Inventory requires at least one organization and associated set of books, at least one business unit must be created in GL.
For specific setup information see, Oracle General Ledger User Guide.
In Oracle Partner Management, Oracle Inventory is necessary for the successful functioning of various flows. Oracle Inventory serves as the repository for products or collateral that can be ordered from an organization. Products or items in Oracle Inventory reside in the MTL_SYSTEM_ITEMS table.
Opportunities and special pricing requests have products associated with them; these products must be present in Oracle Inventory for them to be tracked in the system and subsequently available for use in Oracle Partner Management. In addition, if partners will be charged a fee to enroll in partner programs, then partner programs must be available as items in Oracle Inventory.
Oracle Inventory requires one inventory organization to be identified. Typically this is the Master Inventory Organization. In a multiple operating unit environment, the Master Inventory Organization should consist of all the products from all the operating units, it serves as the highest organizational level.
If you need to separate products (sold from each operating unit) into different inventory organizations, create a separate inventory organization for each operating unit. These operating units should exist only as subsets of the Master Inventory Organization.
Implement Oracle Inventory as described in the Oracle Inventory Implementation Guide.
Oracle Partner Management derives its product data using the product catalog provided by Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). PLM provides a product hierarchy located in the OLTP schemas. This hierarchy is maintained by the user in a Product Catalog and is expanded to a de-normalized table (designed for efficient traversal) by the Sales and Marketing applications.
For information on defining product categories, see Oracle Advanced Product Catalog User Guide.
Oracle Partner Management uses Oracle Receivables to record customer information. Customer registration information is maintained in the Trading Community Architecture (TCA). TCA stores all customer, partner, prospect, and other customer related information in a single repository. Oracle Accounts Receivable is used during partner program enrollment to verify partner billing and address information against tax locations.
At a minimum, you need to perform the required Oracle Receivables setups, defining system options including tax options and address validation, as described the Oracle Receivables User Guide.
In this release, Multi-Org Access Control (MOAC) functionality enables users to access information across multiple operating units from a single responsibility. Previously, only one operating unit could be associated with a responsibility, so users had to change responsibilities to access different operating units.
For internal vendor users, the MOAC functionality is useful. However, partner users, who are not familiar with the vendor's internal organization, do not need Multi-Org Access Control. Therefore, vendors and partners require different setups.
Vendors who want to set up multi-org access for a responsibility should do the following:
Create an HR security profile with one or more operating units.
Assign the HR security profile to the profile option MO: Security Profile at the site or responsibility level.
Assign a default operating unit to the profile option MO: Default Operating Unit at the site, responsibility, or user level.
For partners, use the following setup:
Define the operating unit by using the MO: Operating Unit profile option at the responsibility level. If only one operating unit is supported for all partner users, set the profile option at the site level.
Set the MO: Security Profile to null at all levels.
See the Multi-Org Implementation Guide for details.
This section describes the Oracle applications with which Oracle Partner Management integrates. Which applications a specific Oracle Partner Management implementation will integrate with is determined by the flows and functionality that are set during implementation. The following table provides an overview of Oracle Partner Management integrations by flow or feature. In the rest of this section, more detailed information is provided about each integrated application and how it is used by Oracle Partner Management.
| Function or Flow | Oracle Application |
|---|---|
| Channel Manager Dashboard | General Ledger, Marketing, Order Management, Sales, Trade Management, Territory Management, Resource Manager |
| Deal Registration | Approvals Management, Data Quality Management, Sales, Territory Management, Workflow Builder |
| Opportunity Management | Quoting, Sales, Workflow Builder, Marketing, Deals, Referrals |
| Partner Dashboard | iStore, Marketing |
| Partner Funds | Approvals Management, Inventory, Trade Management, Workflow Builder |
| Partner Program Enrollment | Approvals Management, Payment, Order Management. Payment and Order Management are mandatory if a fee is charged for program enrollment. |
| Partner Programs | Advanced Pricing, Approvals Management, Content Manager, Contracts, Inventory, Marketing, Order Management, Workflow Builder, XML Publisher |
| Referrals | Approvals Management, Data Quality Management, Sales, Trade Management, Territory Management, Workflow Builder |
| Special Pricing | Approvals Management, Data Quality Management, Marketing, Trade Management, Workflow Builder |
Oracle Advanced Pricing is used to set up price lists and manage pricing for Oracle applications. Oracle Partner Management can use Oracle Advanced Pricing to track and manage pricing for partner programs. In addition to allowing you to set up a price list for a partner program, Oracle Advanced Pricing can be used to track customer discounts and to perform currency conversion. You can use advanced pricing’s pricing engine to calculate the estimated program fee. A vendor user or channel manager can use advanced pricing to offer any discounts for any program when inviting a partner to the same program
Oracle Partner Management can use either Oracle Advanced Pricing or Oracle Order Management to create and store pricing information associated with partner programs. Which application is used is determined by the profile option QP: Source System Code (set at the application level). Oracle Partner Management uses Order Management to calculate taxes
Oracle Approvals Management (AME) is a self-service web application that allows users to define business rules governing the process for approving transactions. AME enables business users to specify approval rules for a flow without having to write code or customize the application.
Oracle Approvals Management is used in the following Oracle Partner Management flows:
Deal Registration. Approvers and approval rules for deal registration requests are created and managed through AME.
Partner Funds. Approvers and approval rules for partner fund requests are created and managed through AME.
Partner Program Enrollment. Approvers and approval rules for partner program registration requests are created and managed through AME.
Referrals. Approvers and approval rules for lead and opportunity referral requests are created and managed through AME.
Special Pricing. Approvers and approval rules for special pricing requests are created and managed through AME.
Oracle Content Manager (OCM) is a key component of the Sales, Marketing and E-Commerce applications that enables content to be stored and managed in a central repository. OCM features include work flow, versioning, translations, and renditions. Using content types, OCM is able to keep content separated from its presentation layer.
Oracle Content Manager is used in the following Oracle Partner Management flows:
Partner Programs. Oracle Content Manager is used to store the HTML content, including images, that appears in the Program Overview. The Program Overview provides a summary of a partner program.
Partner Dashboard. When an organization uses OCM as the information repository for iStore, the images and text that appear on the Partner Dashboard will be stored in OCM as well.
Oracle Contracts provides the common infrastructure components that are used by Oracle applications to create and manage contracts. The common components provided by Oracle Contracts are a terms library, authoring and printing tools, and contract document management.
A vendor organization might require its partners to agree to legal terms and conditions as a requirement for participating in a partner program. Oracle Partner Management uses Oracle Contracts to provide legal terms for partner programs. A partner program can have one or more contracts associated with it. Which contract a partner sees can be controlled by defining geographic and member type conditions for each contract.
Data Quality Management (DQM) is a tool from the Oracle Trading Community Architecture (TCA) group that is used to check for duplicate information. Oracle Partner Management uses DQM to check for potential duplicate customers, contacts, and special pricing requests.
Oracle DQM is used in the following Oracle Partner Management flows:
Deal Registration. DQM is used to find potential customer or contact matches for deal registration requests submitted by partners.
Referrals. DQM is used to find potential customer or contact matches for leads or opportunities submitted by partners.
Special Pricing. DQM is used to find potential customer or contact matches for special pricing requests submitted by partners. Regulations required that the same pricing be offered to all partners bidding on the same deal. DQM is used to identify special pricing requests submitted by different partners for the same deal.
Oracle Payment is a framework that enables you to build integrations with financial institutions and payment processors for payment and receipt processing. Oracle Payment provides you with out-of-the-box integrations with leading payment vendors. You can create additional integrations as needed.
Oracle Payment also provides you with a common payment engine for outbound and inbound payments. It also allows you to manage credit card risk and perform transaction reporting. Oracle Payment also supports secure transactions.
Oracle Partner Management uses Oracle Payment to enable credit card payments for partner program enrollment. Oracle Payment stores and authorizes information, which is later used by Oracle Receivables to retrieve funds. Before being able to accept electronic credit card payments through Payment, a Payment server must be set up. In addition, an organization will need an SSL certificate to implement HTTPS to secure credit card transactions.
Oracle Partner Management uses iStore to build the Partner Dashboard and to set up security for the dashboard based on partner responsibilities. If you are integrating with Oracle Marketing, you can also create web advertisements and display them on the Partner Dashboard. A specific enrollment flow template has been seeded to simplify the design of enrollment pages.
Oracle Marketing helps marketing professionals create campaigns that are targeted toward customers. Oracle Marketing provides numerous tools that help marketing professionals to analyze campaign effectiveness, create and manage campaign budgets, capture leads generated by campaigns, create and manage promotions, and generate price lists that meet customer demands.
Oracle Marketing is used in the following Oracle Partner Management flows:
Channel Manager Dashboard. A vendor user with the appropriate permission sees a Create as List button on his Partners page. Clicking this button creates a list containing the partners displayed on the page. The list is accessible from Oracle Marketing, and can be used to create a marketing campaign targeting the partners.
Opportunity Management. Opportunities generated by marketing campaigns can be routed to the partners participating in the campaign.
Partner Dashboard. Users can create and execute web advertising campaigns that appear on Partner Dashboards. Oracle Marketing is used to create the web placement for the ad, create the campaign and campaign schedule, and select the ad content. A web campaign can appear on all partner dashboards or a list of partners can be created and a campaign can be set up that targets those partners specifically.
Partner Funds. A partner fund is associated with one or more budgets. In turn, each budget is associated with one or more marketing activities. The activities are created in Oracle Marketing, and are associated with budgets when the budgets are created in Oracle Trade Management.
Partner Programs. Partner program approval is managed through the Oracle Marketing approvals process. The Oracle Marketing approvals process allows approvers to be associated with a partner program type, and allows approval requests to be routed sequentially. The Oracle Marketing Framework works behind the scenes to route approval requests, send notifications, and manage approval statuses.
Oracle Order Management allows you to efficiently capture customer orders from multiple sales channels and fulfill orders using any fulfillment method. Oracle Order Management captures demand from multiple sales channels including web stores, field sales, call centers, service centers, and customer systems. Oracle Order Management integrates with Oracle Advanced Pricing to provide a highly flexible setup mechanism and pricing engine that accurately applies pricing, deals and promotions to customer orders.
Oracle Order Management is used in the following Oracle Partner Management flows:
Channel Manager Dashboard. Oracle Order Management provides the data for the Sales Year-to-Date key metric. This data is also used to create the graph that appears on the dashboard.
Partner Programs: Oracle Order Management is used to process cash, check, or credit card payment methods for partner programs.
Partner Program Enrollments. Oracle Order Management creates a sales order and provides the billing functionality for partner program enrollments. Oracle Order Management allows you to associate a sales person with enrollment request orders and set up order cancellation reasons.
Special Pricing. Accrual and off-invoice special pricing requests are fulfilled with inventory that is ordered from the vendor organization (scan data special pricing requests are fulfilled with existing partner inventory). Order Management is used to place and manage the orders for new inventory special pricing requests.
Oracle Quoting enables simple, secure creation and management of customer quotes across sales and interaction channels. Oracle Quoting is used in Opportunity Management flows. Once a partner accepts an opportunity, a partner user can create a quote for the customer and publish it to the customer. The partner user can add products to the quote and select a price list for the quote, and then submit the quote for approval by the vendor. Once the partner, customer, and vendor agree on the quote, the partner user can place an order (through Oracle Order Management) and monitor the order status.
Oracle Sales is an application for sales professionals that simplifies and optimizes the task of planning and managing the sales process. Oracle Partner Management's Opportunity Management pages are integrated with the Oracle Sales application. In order to enable partner functionality, you need to perform some implementation procedures to ensure that the opportunity pages appear and function correctly.
In this release, the Oracle Sales Opportunities page uses a feature called Flexible Layout for the External Salesteam section. With Flexible Layout, an object can be positioned on any tab on the page, rather than only on the Sales Team tab. See the Oracle Application Framework Personalization Guide for setups.
Oracle Sales is integrated into the following Oracle Partner Management flows:
Channel Manager Dashboard. The Channel Manager Dashboard displays opportunity metrics for all the partners managed by the channel manager in the Key Metrics areas. In addition, the Partner Details page displays opportunity metrics for each partner.
Deal Registration. When a partner's deal registration request is approved, a new opportunity is created for the deal. Opportunities are stored in Oracle Sales tables. If an organization is using both Oracle Sales and Oracle Partner Management, the opportunity will be visible from both applications.
Opportunity Management. For opportunities that are assigned to partners, Oracle Partner Management integrates with the Sales pages to provide the detailed information regarding the assignment history. Additionally, Oracle Partner Management provides the complete functionality to manage the partners that are working on the opportunity.
Referrals. When a partner's referral is approved, either a new opportunity or lead is created, or the referral is linked to an existing opportunity or lead. Opportunities and leads are stored in Oracle Sales tables. If an organization is using both Oracle Sales and Oracle Partner Management, the opportunity or lead will be visible from both applications.
Oracle Partner Management is integrated with Oracle TeleSales. Oracle Partner Management exposes a subset of the partner management capabilities that are available in Oracle Sales.
For opportunities, the Telesales user can route the opportunity to a preferred partner, check routing status, and view routing history. The option to require channel manager approval during routing is also available in Oracle Telesales.
For leads, the TeleSales user can specify a preferred partner for the lead, and when the lead is converted to an opportunity, the preferred partner is transferred to the opportunity.
Oracle Trade Management provides the consumer goods industry tools to aid in trade planning and offer management, budget management, claim and deduction management, and indirect sales management. Oracle Trade Management is used in the following Oracle Partner Management flows:
Channel Manager Dashboard. From the Channel Manager Dashboard, a vendor user can see the amount of money that is owed to a partner to settle its open claims, and the amount of partner funds a partner has requested year-to-date.
Referrals. Oracle Trade Management is used to compensate partners for referring winning leads and opportunities to the vendor. Oracle Trade Management is used to create and manage one or more budgets that are used to track compensation to partners who refer opportunities. When the referral results in a sales order, the system automatically generates a claim based on the compensation parameters set up in the referral benefit.
Partner Funds. Oracle Trade Management is used to reimburse partners that have participated in successful marketing campaigns for the vendor. Oracle Trade Management is used to create and manage one or more budgets that are used to fund partner marketing activities. In addition, Oracle Trade Management provides a seeded offer type that is used to generate claims for partners who are requesting reimbursement for their activities.
Special Pricing. Oracle Trade Management is used to reimburse partners for special pricing situations. Oracle Trade Management is used to set up one or more budgets to track special pricing funds. In addition, Oracle Trade Management seeds three offer types that are used to create and manage different types of special pricing requests. Depending on the type of special pricing request submitted, a partner may need to submit a claim for reimbursement, which is handled through Oracle Trade Management as well.
Notification messages for numerous Oracle Partner Management flows are created using the Oracle Workflow Builder application. The notifications are associated with an object (such as a fund request or special pricing request) and are sent out as the result of an event, such as the change of an object's status.
Seeded notifications and messages for Oracle Partner Management are provided in Oracle Workflow Builder; in this guide, lists of notifications and messages are provided in the chapter devoted to each flow that integrates with the application. You might be able to implement the seeded notifications without modification. To make changes to the seeded notifications or create new notifications, access Oracle Workflow Builder and the Oracle database.
Oracle Workflow Builder is used in the following Oracle Partner Management flows:
Deal Registration. Notifications are sent to recipients at various times in the deal registration process.
Opportunity Management. Notifications are sent to various recipients when an opportunity's status changes.
Partner Funds. Notifications are sent to recipients at various times in the fund process.
Partner Programs. Notifications are sent to partners based upon partner program enrollment request status. Notifications are also sent to a partner when its membership in a program is nearing expiration. Notifications are sent to the partner user with the Partner Primary User role.
Referrals. Notifications are sent to recipients at various times in the referral process.
Special Pricing. Notifications are sent to recipients at various times in the special pricing request process.