This chapter covers the following topics:
This chapter provides information about implementation or administration tasks that you might need to perform for multiple Oracle Partner Management business flows or features. To avoid redundancy, information about these tasks is presented in this chapter. Additional information that is needed to complete the task for a specific flow or feature is presented in the appropriate chapter.
To perform the tasks in this chapter, you will need access to other applications, or have access to a user who is responsible for administering those applications. To perform the procedures for these associated applications, you will want to refer to the documentation for the application.
The following table lists the implementation and administration tasks mentioned in this chapter, the business flows or features that require the tasks, and the applications in which you will complete the tasks.
| Task | Business Flow or Feature | Application |
|---|---|---|
| Creating Approval Rules | Deal registration requests Lead or opportunity referral requests Partner funds requests Partner program enrollment requests Special pricing requests |
Oracle Approvals Management |
| Setting up Territories | Channel team creation Deal registration requests Lead or opportunity referral requests |
Oracle Territory Manager |
| Setting up Notifications | Deal registration requests Lead or opportunity referral requests Partner funds requests Partner program enrollment requests Special pricing requests |
Oracle Workflow Builder |
| Setting up Matching Rules | Special pricing requests Deal registration requests Lead or opportunity referral requests |
Oracle Data Quality Management |
| Setting up Notes | Deal registration requests Lead or opportunity referral requests Partner fund requests Special pricing requests |
Oracle Common Application Components |
Approval rules and approvers for partner program enrollment requests, special pricing requests, partner fund requests, deal registration and referral requests, and Data Quality Management (DQM) approvals are defined in the Oracle Approval Management application.
An approval rule associates one or more conditions with an approval in an if-then statement, and each condition tests the value of an attribute (you can think of an attribute as a variable). The approval rule also defines the list of approvers to which the transaction is routed if the conditions are met. For example:
If condition C1 is true and condition C2 is true then do approval A1
For example, to create the approval process “For a referral request from a partner in the United States, require approval from a user with the Channel Manager role,” the rule might be:
If CUSTOMER_COUNTRY = US then require user with role Channel Manager to approve
You associate a rule with a transaction type, and a transaction type is associated with an application. You can associate the same rule with several transaction types, and therefore several applications.
Setting up approval rules and approvers involves specifying a condition for one or more attributes, setting up approval groups, and defining rules. For information about rule creation, refer to the Implementing Oracle Approval Management guide.
Oracle Partner Management uses territories created in Oracle Territory Manager to:
Associate channel managers and channel representatives with partners (that is, to set up a channel team)
Identify the country of the customer for which a partner is registering a deal or referring a lead or an opportunity.
A Partner Management territory must be set up before a channel team can be assigned to a partner and opportunities can be matched with partners. In addition, an organization must have a Trade Management territory set up if it is going to implement lead and opportunity referral as a partner program benefit. Optionally, a Trade Management territory can be used for deal registration, although it is not required for implementation. The same Trade Management territory is used for both referrals and deal registrations.
Note: If you are implementing deal registration or referrals, you will need to set up two separate territories. Set up a territory with the usage Partner Management to create a populate channel teams. Set up a territory with the usage Trade Management for use with referrals and deal registrations.
There are three main steps involved in creating a territory: enabling transaction matching attributes, setting up the territory, and running concurrent programs to populate the territory. For detailed information about the application and territory creation and management, refer to the Oracle Territory Manager Implementation Guide.
Notification messages for deal registration requests, partner fund requests, special pricing requests, and lead or opportunity referral requests 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. The notifications for a specific module are identified by a unique Item Type; the following table lists the notification item types for Oracle Partner Management flows.
| Business Flow | Notification Item Type |
|---|---|
| Deal registration request | PVDEALRN |
| Partner fund request | OZFSFBEN |
| Special pricing request | OZFSPBEN |
| Lead or opportunity referral request | PVREFFRL |
| Opportunity routing and assignment | POL Assignment Routing |
Seeded notifications and messages for Oracle Partner Management are provided in Oracle Workflow Builder. You might be able to implement the seeded notifications without modification. However, if you need to make changes to the seeded notifications or create new notifications, you will need access to Oracle Workflow Builder and the Oracle database. Note that you can not create new notifications for opportunity routing or assignment, but you can modify the text of the seeded notifications.
If necessary, you can also create additional processes, create notifications for the processes, and associate new or existing messages with notifications. Creating new processes, notifications, and messages requires programming skills.
For information on using Oracle Workflow Builder, refer to the Oracle Workflow Builder Implementation Guide.
Data Quality Management (DQM) is a tool from the Oracle Trading Community Architecture (TC) group that is used to check for duplicate information. Oracle Partner Management uses DQM to check for potential duplicate customers, contacts, leads, opportunities, referrals, deal registrations, and special pricing requests.
When a referral, deal, or special pricing request is submitted by a partner, a DQM approver in the vendor organization compares the new information against existing records. If there are no matches for the customer or contact associated with the referral, deal, or special pricing request, the new customer and contact are created in the system. If there are matches for the object, the DQM approver reviews the existing records decides to do one of the following:
Associate the new customer and/or contact with an existing customer record.
Create a new organization and contact.
Associate the special pricing request with an existing request.
The following information is intended to get you started with DQM. To set up DQM rules, refer to the Oracle® Trading Community Architecture Data Quality Management User Guide.
You use DQM to manage duplicate parties in the TCA registry. The TCA registry is the central repository of party information for all Oracle applications. The party information includes details about organizations and people, the relationships among the parties, and the places where the parties do business.
DQM has defined four types of attributes that represent logical entities that are stored in the TCA registry: party, address, contact, and contact point. Each attribute corresponds to a table column in the TCA registry. Attributes are used to search for possible matches between an input record and the TCA registry data. Numerous seeded attributes are provided; you can also create custom attributes.
New records can include typographical errors, spelling errors, inconsistent formats, and abbreviations due to input errors. For this reason, searches performed on raw values often are inconclusive or miss potential matches. Transformation functions transform attribute values in the staged schema so that the values are more similar and useful for the purpose of matching records. Transformation functions neutralize the effects of data errors on your searches. For example, a transformation function that removes all of the double letters in a party name transforms a name such as Allied Freight into Alied Freight. This transformation makes it easier to match to a party if a typographical error, such as a missing double letter, exists.
After your raw data has been transformed and populated into the staged schema, match rules can use the transformed data to score each record to determine if the record is considered alike enough to be a match to an input value.
DQM includes several seeded transformation functions. You can also create custom functions.
Match rules determine whether two parties should be identified as a match or potential duplicate. When you define match rules, you specify which attributes will be used in the matching, and configure how the attributes should be evaluated. For each attribute that you use in a match rule, you also assign one or more transformation functions. You can also set up scoring rules, which allow you to calculate a match score for each record. Scoring provides more flexible and granular matching.
Oracle Common Application Components (CRM) provides Notes functionality that allows users to associate free-form comments with a business object. In Oracle Partner Management, CRM Notes are available for deal registration, referrals, partner funds, and special pricing.
Oracle Partner Management is seeded with numerous note types; you can create additional note types to meet your organization's needs. To reduce the number of note types that your users see when selecting a note type when creating a new note, you can map note types to a source.
For information about notes, refer to the Oracle Common Application Components Implementation Guide.