Claim assignment involves assigning the right owners to claims. Claim owners are responsible for settling claims and resolving claim-related issues.
Information in this section will enable you to:
Understand the concepts of claim ownership and auto assign owner
Reassign owners by using claim assignment owner
Every claim must have an owner. Owners are assigned either manually or automatically during claim creation. Automatic assignment occurs if Auto Assign Owner has been implemented in your organization.
A claim owner can be either an individual or a team. Teams can consist of multiple individuals and pre-defined groups of individuals. When a claim is owned by a team, one individual is always designated as the primary owner. The name of the primary owner appears in the Owner field on the Claim Detail page. The primary owner can add and remove team members, and also reassign claim ownership to another individual.
Team ownership enables you to manage scenarios where a specific claim owner is not easily determined during claim creation. In such cases, collective ownership and collaborative investigation may be required. See the Oracle Channel Revenue Management Implementation Guide for information on setting up teams.
Assigning a team to such claims enable you to:
Avoid settlement delays that may occur if you assign a wrong owner.
For example, a claim that is assigned to a wrong owner may remain in a pending state for a lengthy period of time before it is reassigned to the proper owner.
Avoid creating many complex territories to handle every business scenario.
For example, based on the customer's address, an organization knows that Claim #1020 should be assigned to a team member in the California territory. However, there is not enough information available to select a specific team member. The claim is therefore assigned to a team in the California territory. One of the team members recognizes that it is their responsibility and takes ownership of the claim.
If the Auto Assign Owner feature has been implemented in your organization, a claim owner is assigned automatically whenever a claim is created in Oracle Trade Management or in Oracle Receivables. You can initiate owner reassignment by selecting the Auto Assign check box on the Claim Detail page.
For example, a claim with the reason--Shipping was initially assigned to John. Upon investigation, John determines that the claim is a pricing error. John changes the claim reason to Pricing Error. Because he is not sure who should be working on this claim, he checks the Auto Assign Owner box and clicks Update. The system assigns a new owner based on the new claim reason.
As a prerequisite to enable assignment of owners, the Administrator must perform the following:
Set up pre-defined groups in Oracle Resource Manager.
Set up automatic assignment of an individual or a team in Oracle Territory Manager.
Claims supports the use of Oracle Territory Management to define territories and assign claim owners based on multiple customer, product, and geographical attributes, and claim type and reason.
If the Auto Assign Owner feature has been implemented, a claim owner is assigned automatically whenever a claim is created in Oracle Trade Management or in Oracle Receivables. Owner reassignment is triggered by selecting the Auto Assign check box on the Claim Detail page.
To reassign claims by using auto assign owner, log into Oracle Trade Management as Oracle Trade Management User.
Prerequisites:
Assignment Manager must be implemented. See the Oracle Marketing Implementation Guide for instructions on implementing this feature.
Territories must have been set up for assignment purposes.
Navigation: Claim > Claims > Claim Name.
Notes:
Select the Auto Assign Owner check box, and click Update.
After creating and assigning a claim, you must submit the claim for approval. A claim can be settled only after it is approved by the designated approvers.
Information in this section will enable you to:
Understand the claim approval process
Initiate claim approval
Approve claims
The claim settlement process begins after you submit a claim for approval. Claim approval rules determine the approval flow, and the submitted claim is routed to the designated approvers. Claim approvers may approve or reject a claim.
The claim status changes along with the approval flow. Claim statuses enable you to know the exact status of the claim at any point of time.
The following table describes the various statuses that a claim may go through.
| Claim Status | Description |
|---|---|
| New | The claim status appears as New when it is created in Oracle Trade Management, but has not yet been researched upon. When a claim is created in Oracle Receivables, by default the claim status appears as Open. |
| Open | The claim status appears as Open when a you start the claim research process. The claim status may change to Complete, Pending Approval, or Pending Close. |
| Complete | You may manually change the claim status from Open to Complete. No approval is required to change the claim status from Open to Complete. It means that you have completed most of the research, but do not want to settle the claim immediately. When the claim status is Complete, you can request approval for the claim and initiate the settlement process. The claim status may change to either Pending Approval or Pending Close. |
| Pending Approval | You may request approval when the claim status is either Open or Complete. After you submit the claim for approval, if the approvers do not respond to the request, the claim status appears as Pending Approval. Depending on whether the approvers approve or reject the request, the claim status may change to either Approved, or Rejected. You cannot change this status to any other status. |
| Approved | The claim status changes to Approved after all the approvers approve the claim. This is a temporary status because the settlement process begins immediately after the claim is approved. The claim status may change to either Closed or Pending Close. |
| Rejected | The claim status changes to Rejected if the approvers reject the claim. You may manually change the status to Open and resubmit it for approval. |
| Pending Close | After a claim is approved, the claim status appears as Pending Close if the settlement process is not automated real time, but requires some concurrent process such as the Claim Settlement Fetcher to finish the claim processing. After the processing is complete, the claim status changes to Closed. |
| Closed | The claim status appears as Closed after the claim is settled. |
| Cancelled | The claim status can be updated to Cancelled only from Oracle Receivables and not from Oracle Trade Management. A claim cannot be settled when it is in the Cancelled status. |
To submit a claim for approval, log into Oracle Trade Management as Oracle Trade Management User.
As a prerequisite, an existing open claim should exist.
Navigation: Claim > Claims > Claim Name > Request Approval > Confirm.
After you submit the claim for approval, the claim approval rules determine the approval flow, and the submitted claim is routed to the designated approvers and they will receive a workflow notification.
The Preview Approval page enables you to review the information before you submit it for approval. You can see the list of approvers from the Preview Approval page.
Click Confirm to submit the object (budget, offer, or claim) for approval. The request is routed to the designated approvers and they receive a workflow notification. The status of the object changes to Active after they approve the request.
If you are the creator and approver of the object according to the approval rules, change the status of the object to Active and click Confirm.
You can set approval rules for:
Earnings - Earnings approval rules are checked only if earning associated are over the threshold. The override threshold must be set to true in the Associate Earnings page.
Performance - The Performance approval flag must be checked in Custom Setup. The profile OZF: Override Offer Performance Requirement must be set to No. Claims must have earnings associated and the associated offer must have a performance requirement.
Claims - Claim must be checked in System Parameters.
When claims are submitted for approval, you will receive workflow notifications if you are the claim approver according to the approval rules.
To approve a claim, log into Oracle Trade Management as Oracle Trade Management Super User.
As a prerequisite, a claim must have been submitted for approval.
Navigation: Workflow > Worklist or Home > Tools > View Notification Work List.
Notes:
Select the notification that corresponds to the claim that must be approved, and click Approve.
You can navigate to the Create Claim page and select the Mass Approvals tab to approve multiple claims together. The Claims: Mass Approvals page displays all the claims pending your approval. You can further enhance your search by claim type, reason, class, customer, currency, amount, date, owner, bill-to, previous open credit or debit memo, sales representative, payment method, and receipt number.
For more information, you can see Implementing Rule Based Settlement in the Oracle Accounts Receivable Deductions Settlement Implementation Guide.