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About Assignment Candidates

In Siebel Assignment Manager, candidates represent the people or organizations who are evaluated as potential assignees for objects. Depending on the assignment rule you use, and the object to which a candidate is assigned, candidates can be positions, employees, or organizations, and can be assigned as individuals or as members of a team. When processing rules, Assignment Manager determines potential candidates either statically from an assignment rule or dynamically from an attribute on the object row.

Static means that candidates do not change before releasing rules (unless you intentionally associate other, different candidates). You associate candidates statically with an assignment rule by adding candidates to the Employee Candidates, Position Candidates, or Organization Candidates view tabs within the assignment rule. Alternatively, you can associate all people or all organizations as candidates for a rule. The following subtopics describe the different types of assignment candidates as well as primary assignees.

For information about dynamic candidates and dynamic candidate behavior, see Dynamic Candidates.

Employee Candidates

Employees represent candidates distinguished by their skills and product expertise, and are typically used as candidates in service organizations. For example, a service organization would want to assign employees with the proper skills and expertise to objects, because these employees possess specific skills that are related to the service request or activity. Assignment Manager can also take into account a specific employee's work schedule, calendar, and regional schedule when determining assignments by creating rules based on an employee's availability.

Position Candidates

Positions represent candidates distinguished by their job functions, and are typically used as candidates in sales organizations. For example, a sales organization would want to assign positions to objects, because these positions are responsible for a region or territory.

By assigning objects to positions, you can have one sales representative inherit the opportunities, accounts, and contacts from another representative by reassigning the employee responsible for a specific position.

NOTE:  An assignment object can be either position-based or employee-based, but not both. Assignment Manager does not support assignment of employees and positions to the same assignment object.

Organization Candidates

An organization represents a group of positions that has limited visibility to particular application data. For example, your company can create separate and distinct organizations to distribute specific information to organizational groups both inside and outside of your enterprise. Both internal and external users are granted access only to the information that they should see (such as accounts, opportunities, and contacts) and data they need to see (such as price lists, products, and literature).

By assigning objects to organizations, you can maintain better security and promote proper business practices by controlling data access and visibility between different organizations. For example, you can limit your distributors' data access by giving them visibility to product information, but restrict their visibility to price lists for the products. To do this, you can create a separate organization for your distributors that does not have access to the price list data. In this case, the price lists are not available to your distributors even if they are assigned to the products.

Some objects allow the assignment of a single organization, whereas other objects allow the assignment of multiple organizations to the same object. For more information about which candidates can be assigned to each of the predefined assignment objects, see Table 3.

Teams Versus Individual Candidates

A team represents a group of employees or positions. Assigning a team allows you to assign a group of individuals that possess various skills or job functions to a particular object.

In sales organizations, teams are typically assigned to objects. For example, you can assign a sales representative and a sales consultant to an opportunity. Or you can assign a team of sales professionals—two district representatives, a regional manager, and a sales engineer—to work a single, large sales opportunity.

An individual represents a single employee or a position. Assigning individuals allows you to assign exclusive ownership to an individual who possesses a specific skill or expertise for a particular object.

In service organizations, individuals are typically assigned to objects. For example, you can assign a customer service representative with expertise in disk drives to all service requests that are marked for this area.

Assignment objects can be team-based, individual-based, or both. That is, the same assignment object can be team-based for employees and individual-based for organizations.

Table 3 shows which candidates can be assigned to some of the predefined assignment objects. This table also shows which assignment objects are restricted to a single assignee, and assignment objects that are capable of incorporating a team of assignees. S indicates the ability to allow only a single owner or assignment; M indicates the ability to allow multiple owners or team assignments.

If you need to modify the default properties—for example, if you want to assign accounts to employees—you can do so by configuring the assignment object properties using Siebel Tools.

Primary Assignees

A primary on an assignment rule represents the candidate (employee, position, or organization) that is assigned as the primary owner of the assignment object if the candidate passes the criteria for that object. The primary is the main or first owner of an assignment object.

When assigning a team of assignees to an object row (depending on the candidate or organization source chosen for the assignment rule), you can configure Assignment Manager to assign one of the assignees as the primary. This assigned primary is usually the highest-scoring assignee from the highest-scoring assignment rule.

However, you can also define a particular candidate as the primary assignee on a specific assignment rule by picking an employee, position, or organization from the Primary Employee, Primary Position, or Primary Organization pick dialog box from the Assignment Rules List. A primary on an assignment rule represents the candidate (employee, position, or organization) that is assigned as the primary owner of the assignment object if the candidate passes the criteria for that rule.

NOTE:  For assignments that allow only single assignees, the single assignee also becomes the primary assignee.

For more information about primary assignees, see Step 7 and Step 8 in Assignment Methodology.