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About Activities

Siebel Business Applications use activities to organize, track, and resolve a variety of tasks, from finding and pursuing opportunities to closing service requests. If a task requires multiple steps that one or more people might complete, activities greatly simplify the job. Activities can help:

• Define and assign the task.
• Provide information to complete the task.
• Track the progress of the task.
• Track costs and bill for the task.

The major advantages of breaking down a task into one or more activities include:

• The ownership of the problem can remain at the management level, when required.
• The employee looking at assigned activities can identify only the required information.
• Reporting is simplified.
• Activities can be assigned to more than one person.

Activities are used to represent tasks in many situations such as scheduling and recording meetings, appointments, and interactions with customers and prospects. If one task leads to follow-up tasks, you can associate follow-up activity records with a parent activity record.

Activities can be viewed in several different locations, including the following:

• My To Do List in the Activities screen. This list shows all the user's activities, regardless of status. Access this list by navigating to the Activities screen and choosing My To Do List from the visibility filter.
• My To Do's in the Calendar screen. This list displays a subset of the data that appears in the My To Do List in the Activities screen, activities that have not been completed. For general information about using the Calendar screen, see Siebel Fundamentals.

Assignment Methods

Activities are assigned to employees. Activity assignment can occur in the following ways:

• Manual assignment.
• Automatic assignment to the creator of the activity (by populating the Owner field with the user ID of the activity's creator).
• Automatic assignment using Assignment Manager. For more information, see Siebel Assignment Manager Administration Guide.

Business Objects Associated with Activities

Siebel activity objects can be associated with other Siebel business objects. Table 56 lists some common associations. In most cases, this association is with a set of activities defined by an activity plan and individual (or stand-alone) activities. In a few cases, an object is associated either with an activity template or with stand-alone activities (not both).