The premises functionality of Siebel Communications is used by administrators, such as distribution network planners, field service engineers, field service operations managers, and managers of customer service representatives. It is also used by end users, such as customer service representatives.

This chapter explains the concept of a premise and describes procedures you can use to manage the creation and maintenance of premise records. It also describes typical procedures that end users might use when working with premise records.

A premise is an address that identifies a physical location, such as a building, apartment, land parcel, and so on, to which communications services can be delivered. In Siebel Communications, a premise acts as a grouping of service points.

A premise record stores the address of a building, apartment, or land parcel to which your company offers communications services. Siebel Communications also stores nonservice addresses that are associated with particular customers, such as billing addresses outside the company's service territory. Nonservice account addresses have a variety of uses, but premise records are specifically used to track addresses at which a company might offer services. Premise records are never deleted from the system and can therefore be used to track asset and service usage even if the premise becomes unoccupied.

Premise records also track service points. A service point is an asset that is installed at a particular service location and represents a network delivery point, such as a phone jack.

For more information about setting up an asset, see Siebel Field Service Guide.

Premise information can be imported into Siebel Communications either periodically in batches, using Siebel Enterprise Integration Manager, or through real-time integration with a third-party application. Premise information can also be entered manually.

Every instance of a service delivered to a particular premise needs a unique identifier, called a service item identifier. Most services are provided through a physical network connection; for example, phone service is connected to a phone jack, and a data access line is connected to a port on a switch. With physical network connections, the Service Point is used as the service item identifier. Some services, such as cellular phone services, do not require a physical network connection. In these cases, a logical identifier, such as a telephone number or IP address, is used as the service item identifier. Typically this identifier is automatically assigned by an external system.