This chapter covers the following topics:
Customers are entities with whom you do business. Customers include organizations, persons, partners, or partner contacts. Use the Customer tab in Oracle Trade Management, to create entries for organizations and persons, and to create and generate Lists. Partner and Partner Contact information is picked from Oracle Partner Management.
The customers that you create in Oracle Trade Management are the same ones that you will use while defining market eligibility for budgets and offers, settling claims and deductions, and for all other customer-related activities. These customers appear as a list of values whenever you perform a search for fields that require customer information.
See the Oracle Trading Community Architecture User Guide for more information on Customers.
A party is a type of Organization or Person, with which you can do business. A party exists separately from any business relationship that it enters into with another party. You can share information about a party such as addresses and contacts with the customer accounts of the party. For example, Vision Distribution could be a party within your trading community.
Information in this section will enable you to:
Understand the concepts of Organization and Person
Create an organization
Access Customer 360 View
Create a person
Note: This section only gives a brief overview of Organization and Person. See the section titled Organization in the Oracle Receivables User Guide and the chapter titled Oracle Sales Quick Reference in the Oracle Sales User Guide for more detailed information.
A customer is an organization or a person with whom you have a selling relationship. This selling relationship can result from the purchase of products and services or from the negotiation of terms and conditions that provide the basis for future purchases.
Customer Account
A customer account represents the business relationship that a party can enter into with another party. The account has information about the terms and conditions of doing business with the party. For example, you could open a commercial account for purchases to be made by Vision Distribution for its internal use and a reseller account for purchases made by Vision Distribution for sales of your products to end–users.
You can create multiple customer accounts for a party to maintain information about categories of business activities. For example, to track invoices for different types of purchases, you can maintain an account for purchasing office supplies and another account for purchasing furniture. You can also maintain multiple customer accounts for customers with multiple lines of business in your organization. You can maintain separate customer profiles, addresses, and contacts for each customer account.
A contact communicates for or acts on behalf of a party or customer account. A contact can exist for a customer at the account or address level. A person can be a contact for an organization or another person. For example, an administrative assistant could be the contact for an executive. A contact point can be either an employee or any other person related to the customer organization who will be responsible for coordinating business transactions between your organization and the customer organization.
Buying Group
A buying group is formed when organizations group themselves to leverage their buying power. For example, when you create a promotion for a buying group, the members place orders and the accruals for each member are tracked individually. During claim settlement, you can view the buying group member accruals and issue payment to the buying group, or directly to one of its members.
A customer site or an account site is the location where a particular party is located. Every party has only one identifying address, but a party can have multiple party sites. A customer address is a party site used in the context of a customer account for billing, shipping, or other purposes.
Related Customer Accounts
Related Customer accounts are set up with relationships. Common relationships include bill-to and ship-to. Large organizations may have many subdivisions and legal entities. Sometimes, the headquarters my place an order and request you to ship the goods to one of its divisions. Another division of the same customer may be responsible for handling the invoices related to the orders. Bill-to and ship-to accounts enable you identify the different locations of such customer organization, and process the orders, shipments, and payments seamlessly.
For example, the headquarters of an organization may be set up as the bill-to account and location for multiple retail stores. Each retail store can be set up as a ship-to account and location. In addition, the headquarters office may be handling all the claims for retail stores, but these retail stores may ultimately receive their payment directly. For more information on setting up Buying Groups and Related Customer Accounts, see the Oracle Receivables User Guide.
Related customer accounts are also used for tracking and reporting financial transactions. Whenever a customer places an order, an invoice is created or payment made, the transactions are posted against the customer's account. In the Campaign to Cash business flow, an account must be created before an order can be entered for the customer. See the Oracle Receivables User Guide for more information.
Organizations can have the following two type of relationships:
| Relationship | Description |
|---|---|
| Organization to Organization | This type of relationship exists between companies, such as, parent and subsidiary, headquarters and division, partner and competitor. |
| Organization to Person | This includes business contact relationships. |
You can create multiple relationship addresses for a relationship. These addresses are selected from a list of customers and related customer existing addresses. When you change an addresses, you must also access the customer or related customers record and change the location there as well. Note that you cannot change the address in the relationship record itself.
Click the Relationships link to access the Relationships summary page. From this summary table you can view existing Organization to Organization, Organization to Person relationships, multiple relationship addresses, phone number, start date, end date, and relationship status.
An organization is a retailer or a wholesaler organization. When you create an organization, you are automatically added to the sales team for that organization.
To create an organization, log into Oracle Trade Management with Oracle Trade Management User responsibility.
As a prerequisite, the OS: Create Organization Privilege must be set to "Yes" to create organizations.
Navigation: Trade Management:Administration > Trade Management > Customer > Organization > Create.
Notes:
Organization Profile:
E-mail address, Web site, and Phone Book: To display a specific e-mail address or web address or a phone number, select the display option against it. You can enter any number of e-mail addresses, web addresses, or phone numbers, but you can display only one of them at a time.
External/ Internal Radio Buttons:Indicates whether the organization is internal to your business or an external organization.
Company Information:
SIC Code: (Standard Industrial Classification Code) Index that describes the function (manufacturer, wholesaler, retailer or service) and the business line of the organization.
DUNS Number: (Data Universal Numbering System Number) DUNS number is a unique business identification number that is assigned to each commercial entity. If the organization has multiple locations, then each location will have a unique DUNS number.
Address Attribute:
Status: If you select Active status, then the organization will be available for use.
Contacts:
Contacts: This is the person who will be the contact point for all the business dealings. Select an existing person or enter a new person. See Contact for more information.
The 360 view of a customer lists all the customer's transactions including orders, invoices, debit memos and chargebacks. From this page, you can click the link for any of these transactions and view it in more detail. To access the 360 view for a customer, log into Oracle Trade Management with Oracle Trade Management User responsibility.
Navigation: Trade Management:Administration > Trade Management > Customer > Organization > Customer Name > 360 View.
A Person represents a contact point for an organization for all the business dealings and correspondence. To create a person, log into Oracle Trade Management with Oracle Trade Management User responsibility.
Navigation: Trade Management:Administration > Trade Management > Customer > Organization > Customer >Person > Create
Notes:
Relationship: This is the type of relationship the person has with the organization.
To modify an existing organization, navigate to Customer > Organization, select the Organization, make appropriate changes and click Update.
Note: Use the Quick Create option to quickly create organizations or persons, without entering detailed information.
The information in this section explains how to create and manage lists.
Working with lists is the process of analyzing, building, and managing lists of customers or prospective customers. Lists are created for specific purposes and are based on predefined templates or other lists, segments, workbooks, or custom SQL. For example, for a product launch campaign, you would specifically target customers who have previously related product from you. To do so, you can use seeded cross sell list templates to build an effective cross sell list of candidates based on past orders.
For detailed information on how to create and manage lists, see the Oracle Marketing Implementation Guide.
Market segmentation identifies groups of customers, or prospects that satisfy business-defined strategic or tactical criteria. For example, a car manufacturer may need to identify different types of consumers based on lifestyle preferences to segment their car buying market accordingly. Once segments are identified, marketers may develop specific marketing programs that will uniquely target each segment.
Topics in this section include:
Segmentation criteria can be saved and used as the basis for list, or target group generation. For example, a segment could be defined for Credit Card dormancy, based on the date of the last customer purchase transaction.
Segments can be created using either a Oracle Discover workbook, or a SQL statement. Unlike a list, which has a fixed set of entries, the entries within a segment may differ over time as customers and prospects migrate in and out of the segment as they satisfy/dissatisfy the business criteria on which the segment is based.
The segment summary page displays all the segments that you have created within Oracle Marketing. You can personalize the attributes on this page by clicking the Personalize button.
Segments can be organized into a segment hierarchy, in which each child segment contains a subset of the entries in their parent segment.
Consider the following example:
Segment A: All customers in the organization’s customer database
Segment B: High income families
Segment C: High income families with kids
Segment B is defined as a child segment of Segment A, and Segment C is a child segment of Segment B.
The segment hierarchy for the above example is depicted in Table Segment Hierarchy Example.
| Segment Name | Segment Criteria | Segment Count | Segment Hierarchy | Segment Condition |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Segment A | All Customers | 100,000 | N/A | N/A |
| Segment B | High income families | 25,000 | Child Segment of Segment A | Intersection of Segment B and Segment A |
| Segment C | High income families with kids | 10,000 | Child Segment of Segment B | Intersection of Segment C and Segment B |
When you create a segment, you can either choose to base it on an Oracle Discoverer Workbook or write your own SQL statement. If you choose Workbook, the associated SQL statement for the Workbook is displayed in the SQL section. This SQL statement is not editable. If you choose SQL, you must enter the SQL statement in the SQL text field.
Notes
Parent Segment: To create a segment hierarchy, select a parent segment. The current segment definition will be a child of the selected parent segment.
Type:
If the Type is Workbook, click the Search icon to select a Workbook.
If the Type is SQL, enter a data source name, and then enter a SQL statement in the SQL field.
The initial status of the segment will be Draft. The Available status implies that the segment is available for lists and target groups. The Cancelled status implies that the segment is not available for lists and target groups.
A valid SQL query (from Oracle Discoverer Workbook or directly typed in Oracle Marketing) must meet the following conditions.
The query statement must be formatted correctly.
The setups that map the results of the segment to a list must be complete.
The query must contain a data source code for mapping. The code for a data source is entered by the administrator while creating it.
The query must contain a unique identifier for the data source.
The query must contain Country if Address 1 is included.
The query must not contain Order By or Group By clauses within it.
If the query contains an alias, the alias must be the same name as the data source view name. This is essential for generating lists based on such segments.
A minimal SQL statement for creating a list will be:
Select '<data source code>',<unique identifier> from <data source object>
In the above example, if the data source's code is 'EXAMPLE_DS', the correct segment query will be:
select 'EXAMPLE_DS', party_name, party_id from hz_parties
Note: Do not enter ; at the end of the SQL statement.
When a segment query is not valid for list generation, the following error message is displayed:
"Error: Cannot create list based on this segment. Please recheck the sql segment"
For the query to execute correctly and create a list with entries in it, a data source is required.
This is the process used to import external data, such as a purchased or rented prospect list, into Oracle Trading Community Architecture.
Oracle Marketing offers a list import process, enabling marketers to map an external data source, such as a purchased or rented list, or an existing customer database, to destination target fields either within the Oracle Customer Model or a staging area within Oracle Marketing (for rented lists).
Topics in this section include:
Overview of List Imports
Rented vs. Purchased Lists
The List Import feature enables you to enrich your customer data with purchased lists and also consolidate the customer data from legacy systems. This feature facilitates the importing of:
Prospects for marketing campaigns
Customers into the Oracle Customer Model (TCA)
Leads for following up by Oracle TeleSales
Event registrants for processing in Oracle Marketing’s event module
The list import process imports records (in .csv or .xml format) from a client desktop, server or an ftp site. For additional details of importing from a server or FTP site, refer the Oracle Marketing Implementation Guide.
The list import process is in the form of a wizard that guides you through the process of importing a rented or purchased list of prospects. The steps in the wizard include:
Selecting the Import Type (Persons, Organization Contacts, Leads, Event Registrants)
Specifying the location of the file
Mapping the fields between the source file and the destination columns (for a list of fields that can be imported, refer to the Oracle Marketing Implementation Guide)
Importing the list import table with the source data
Once the records have been imported, they can be used for campaign or event target group generation.
During the import process, you can specify if the source for the import data is from a Rented or Purchased list. Table Rented Vs Purchased Lists highlights the difference in processing for these two sources.
| Rented List | Purchased List |
|---|---|
| Data stored within a staging area (AMS_LIST_ENTRIES) in Oracle Marketing | Data stored within the staging area and are added to the Oracle Customer Model (TCA) |
| Dummy, inactive records created in Oracle Customer Model (TCA) for the corresponding records | Corresponding customer information is inserted into the Oracle Customer Model (TCA) |
| Rented records are purged based on usage or expiry date | Purchased records are not purged and are maintained within the Oracle Customer Model (TCA) |
For information on Importing a List, see the section titled Importing a List in the Oracle Marketing User Guide. The information includes:
Importing Using the List Import Wizard
If there is an error during list import, then the status of this import will be “Error” (if no import records were successfully imported) or “Incomplete-Errors” (if some of the import records were successfully imported). You can drill down into the import results to obtain additional information about the errors (for example number of error records, number of duplicate records).
Additionally, within the context of a list import error results, the Search feature enables you to query results based on certain key attributes such as first name or last name.
For information on how to handle list import errors, see the section titled List Import Errors in the Oracle Marketing User Guide. Information includes:
Import Errors
You have a selling relationship with a person or organization, regardless of whether anything has been purchased or serviced. A selling relationship can be established simply by negotiation terms that will be used if you later sell products. You create lists, segments, and target groups from a data source of Persons in a Business to Customer (B2C) scenario and a data source of Organizations in a Business to Business (B2B) scenario.
A partner is a company acting on behalf of your enterprise. Partners can be wholesalers or retailers who help to close business deals for you by selling your products. A partner is an entity that will assist you in sales, trade promotion, support services and so on. Partners provide industry expertise or add value to products and services. The different types of partners include:
Prospects
End Users
Original Equipment Manufacturers
Resellers
For additional information, see the Oracle Partner Management Vendor User Guide.