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Example of Using Skill Tables

A skill is a generic row-level attribute that qualifies a person, organization, or assignment object row. For example, if an employee speaks English and Spanish, language is the skill he or she possesses, and English and Spanish are the skill items. Employee, position, and organization skills are used to store skills possessed; the skill tables for objects are used to store skills required. Assignment Manager uses skill tables to do skill matching by comparing the skills on the object with the skills of an employee, position, or organization to determine who passes the rule.

The skill and skill item tables are child and grandchild tables, respectively, of the object used to store skills, and skill items for assignment objects that are not stored as columns in the parent table itself. The employee skill table is used to store skills possessed by employees, such as languages spoken, product expertise, and so on. For example, for an employee who speaks English and Spanish, there is one record in the employee skill table that specifies the skill name as Language. And there are two records in the child employee skill item table that correspond to this skill record: one record for English, and another record for Spanish. For more information on how to assign skills to candidate objects, see Assignment Strategy for Sales Organizations.

For example, the following procedure explains how to configure Assignment Manager so that only employees who speak Spanish are assigned a service request.

To configure Assignment Manager to assign a service request only to employees who speak Spanish

1. Create a service request with Language as the skill and Spanish as the skill item.
   1. In the Service Request skill table for the service request, create one record and specify Language as the skill.
   2. In the child Service Request skill item table, create one record and specify Spanish as the skill item.

      For more information about how to perform this step, see Creating Criteria Values as Skills with Expertise Codes and Weighting Factors.

2. Create an assignment rule that filters employees based on their language skills.
   1. Create an assignment rule and apply the Service Request assignment object.
   2. Create a criterion called Language and use the Compare to Person assignment rule comparison method.

      This criterion, and therefore the rule, passes only employees who have the Spanish language skill.

NOTE:  The above example used the Compare to Person comparison method, however, skill matching can be used with other comparison methods. For more information about comparison methods, see About Assignment Criteria and Criteria Methods.

Assignment Manager can also do skill matching with expertise codes and can use weighting factors to assign weighted scores to different expertise codes. For more information, see Assignment Operation Modes, Expertise Codes, and Weighting Factors.