Glossary

Assignment: When an opportunity is matched to partners.

Assignment Routing: Process that routes an opportunity assignment to partners.

Attribute: Oracle Partner Management provides a flexible profiling framework to capture and track the attributes of a partner. The profiling framework supports fixed attributes, information entered by the partner or channel manager, and derived attributes, information calculated based on partner data and transactions. The profiling framework provides a central repository to capture and track all partner related information. Channel managers can use this information to differentiate partners and provide better services, such as soft funds, incentives, and opportunities.

Benefit: Oracle Partner Management extends benefits to partners based on their program participation.

Campaign: A marketing effort comprising any number of different techniques for reaching Customers or Prospects.

Channel Administrator: The Channel Administrator has access to administrative setups to define profile attributes, program benefits such as referral and deal registration initiatives as well as setups, notifications and partner users accounts.

Channel Manager: The Channel Manager owns the relationship between the vendor and the partner and bears responsibility for managing and distributing information to partners. He works with the partner, assigns and maintains opportunities, and approves assignments, submitted referrals, special pricing requests, fund requests, and deals. Depending upon business rules, he may approve or reject opportunities being assigned to partners. The Channel Manager can maintain opportunities depending upon access and business rules.

Channel Manager Dashboard: The channel manager dashboard provides an easy to use, configurable user interface to help you with your day to day responsibilities. It provides a 360 degree view of your partners and activities, thereby enabling you to make informed decisions.

Channel Manager Timeout: This is the date by which all channel managers must approve or deny the opportunity assignment.

Customer: A purchaser of products or services.

Compensation: If a partner's referral results in orders in the system, they have to be compensated for the same. The compensation rates vary from initiative to initiative and by product. After a partner is compensated, the referral is closed.

Concurrent Manager: The concurrent manager is a process manager that coordinates processes generated by users' requests to run various data-intensive programs. An Oracle applications product group can have several concurrent managers.

Deal Registration: When a partner resells your products, there is often a conflict between your direct sales force and your partner network. Deal Registration enables partners to submit opportunities and receive your commitment not to compete directly and to support the partner on the deal.

Distributor: A business that buys, warehouses, ships, invoices and resells; a party that acts as an intermediary in order and inventory management.

DQM: Data Quality Management (DQM) is a tool that is used to check for potential duplicate customers, contacts, address and/or contact points for a given customer, contact, address or a contact. The system finds potential duplicates using rules defined within DQM.

Enrollment: Enrollments enables you to administer and expedite the registration of partners into Oracle Partner Management by enrolling them into programs.

Existing Inventory: When a partner has already bought the product and wants a discount for past purchases.

Expense Breakdown: This is the breakdown of expenses for the marketing activity. The line items appearing within the Expense Breakdown are based on the Activity you selected.

Forms: Forms are a logical collection of fields, regions, and graphical components that appears on a single window. Oracle Forms resemble paper forms used to run a business. You enter data by typing information into the form.

Forms Server: A Forms server is a type of application server that hosts the Forms server engine. It mediates between the desktop client and the database, providing input windows for the Forms-based products on the desktop client and creating or changing database records based on user actions.

Framework: A framework is a collection of collaborating classes. The interaction framework dictates the architecture. It defines the overall structure, its partitioning into classes and objects, the key responsibilities, how the classes and objects collaborate, and the thread of control.

Fund Request: The request a partner submits (or a vendor on behalf of a partner) in order to request soft fund dollars from you.

Fund Request Claim: After a fund request is approved and the partner has executed the planned marketing activity, the partner can submit a claim to redeem money from you.

Hyperlink: A link to another page.

Indirect Managed Partner/IMP: Smaller partner organizations that deal with VADs to purchase and resell specific vendor items. They do not have a direct relationship with you.

Joint Selling: In this routing option, the channel manager offers an opportunity to multiple partners. Multiple partners can accept the opportunity and work together on it.

Joint Assignment: This routing option supports collaborative selling. The opportunity is offered to multiple partners for fulfillment. The partners come together and bring their expertise to win the deal.

Managed Partner: An organization or person who has a strategic agreement with you to conduct certain transactions and is managed directly by you.

Manufacturer: A business or person that produces one or more products (also known as vendor).

Marketing Activity (Partner Fund): This is the marketing activity for which funding is being requested.

Membership Level: Particular levels of participation within a partner program. Membership levels exist within a partner program and can offer partners special incentives and benefits.

Multiple-Parallel: In this routing option, you can also broadcast the opportunity to multiple partners for review at the same time. However, only the partner who accepts it first wins the opportunity. If you want to do multiple matching, you need to select at least two partners from the partner LOV window.

Multiple Serial: This is a variation of the single routing option and you can create an ordered list of partners. The opportunity will be offered to the first partner for review. If the partner accepts it, the assignment is successful. If the partner declines it, it is offered to the second partner in the list for review. You need to select at least two partners from the partner LOV window.

New Inventory: When a partner requests a special price for a new purchase and you approve it, the partner can close the sale to the end-customer at a discounted rate.

Note Status

There are three statuses available for notes:

Public: Other vendor users can see comments.

Publish: Partner users and other vendor users can see comments.

Private: Only you can see comments.

Note Type: These are organization-defined types to used to categorize notes.

Offer

Offers are generated in the background when approving a special pricing request to track the special pricing discount that has been approved. There are three types of offers:

Accrual Offer - The discounted amount will be accrued and the partner will be paid later.
Off-Invoice Offer - The discounted amount will be paid to the partner off the invoice.
Scan Data Offer - If the special pricing request is being fulfilled from existing inventory, the system will generate a Scan Data offer.

Opportunity: A qualified sales opportunity with the potential to bring in revenue. An opportunity has a life span and it eventually closes either because it turns into a sale, is lost to a competitor, or is a bad opportunity. An opportunity is assigned to one or more territories based on a variety of criteria and can be worked on by a single sales representative, by a team of employees, or by a sales partner.

Partner: Partners are organizations with whom you can have a business relationship. Every partner organization is a distinct legal entity with its own challenges, market pressures, customer pressures, and intellectual capital.

Partner Administrator: The partner administrator is the primary contact of the organization and is responsible for administering all opportunities assigned to the partner.

Partner Contact: The primary contact for a partner, (the role responsible for administering all opportunities assigned to the partner) receives e-mail notifications and accepts or declines opportunities on behalf of the partner.

Partner Dashboard: The partner dashboard enables partners to enroll into programs, manage memberships, view and manage company profile, manage users, view product catalog, place orders, view order status, submit referrals, register deals, request soft funds, request discounts, accept opportunities, and work on assigned opportunities.

Partner Fund: Partner funds enable you to better manage and distribute channel marketing funds to your channel partners. You can provide funds for a specific time period and base it on fiscal periods of your organization.

Partner Funds Liability: The liability is the amount of money that you have committed to pay out to your channel partners for marketing activities but have not yet paid out.

Partner List: Oracle Partner Management integrates with Oracle Marketing to enable you to generate partner lists. These lists can then be used to run marketing campaigns for partners. Based on profile attributes, you can create a list and save your search. Based on the search criteria, partners will be displayed and this can be created as a list.

Partner Timeout Period: Partner timeout is based on a partner's country; it is the time period during which a partner who has been offered an opportunity is expected to respond (accept/reject the opportunity) before the next action can occur. These time frames are user-defined and supported by Oracle Workflow through automatic e-mails, notifications, and routing status changes.

Partner Transactions: Partner transactions are records that partners submit or have access to in the system. Examples of partner transactions are opportunities, referrals, deal registrations, special pricing requests, and orders.

Partner Type: A type of partnership with specified terms and conditions, that is Value-Added Distributor (VAD), Value-Added Reseller (VAR), System Integrator (SI), Independent Software Provider (ISP), Supplier, Manufacturer, and so on.

Partner User: A partner user can use the transactional system and request a special price, request funds, submit referrals, and register deals. She can also request an account via self-service and these requests will be routed to partner administrators for approval. She can manage a user's profile, preferences, view their company profile, manage objects that she has access to, and can also purchase things from the store.

Personalize: A function that allows a user to customize many different pages to accommodate specific needs.

Program: Programs are used to segment partners and provide different benefits to partners.

Program Benefit: Programs are used to segment partners and provide different benefits to partners. Partners enrolled in programs can enjoy special benefits such as leads, opportunities, marketing development funds, referrals, deals, and special pricing.

Prospect: A prospect is a prospective customer who has not previously purchased products or services.

Record: A collection of related Fields. All of the fields in a record contain data relating to a single item.

Referral: Partners can submit referrals and receive a commission for referring the business. Partners can refer business opportunities that they cannot fulfill directly. For example, the customer is interested in a product that the reseller does not offer. The partner can submit a referral and receive a percentage of the revenue generated by the sale.

Reseller: A business that buys goods from a manufacturer and resells them to customers unchanged.

Similar Special Pricing Request: Special pricing provides approval with a decision support tool to compare similar requests and link similar requests. This mechanism ensures legal compliance with U.S. pricing laws. It essentially enables you to ensure similar pricing. Regardless of your geography, it enables you to ensure the same or similar pricing for all special pricing requests for a particular end-customer deal.

Special Pricing: Special Pricing enables you to automate and streamline the special pricing process in which your partners request discounts on sales deals. You can respond quickly and intelligently to your partners' requests for special, discounted pricing, thus closing more sales and increasing partner loyalty.

Special Pricing Claim: When a special pricing request is approved, partners can close the sale at the discounted price and submit a claim to collect payment.

Special Pricing Request: A special pricing request enables partners to request discounted pricing from you. They can request discounts on competitive sales deals, specific end-customer deals, and on inventory that they have not been able to move.

Special Pricing Request Type

The request types are:

Meet Competitor Price: When a partner wants to match a competitor's price, they can ask you to reduce the price to complete a sale.
Bid Request: When a partner wants to win a deal for a specific end-customer.
Blanket Request: When a partner has inventory in his warehouse and has not been able to move it, they can ask for a discount to move the unsold inventory.

Special Pricing Liability: The liability is the amount of money that you have committed to pay out to your channel partners for discounts but have not yet paid out.

Status: Statuses are assigned to various marketing objects to let users and the system know the state of the object. Changes in status may be affected by the user or may be affected by the system, particularly those status changes requiring approval.

Structured Query Language (SQL): Sometimes pronounced Sequel, Structured Query Language is a standard for querying, or asking questions of, a database.

Single Assignment: In this routing option, the opportunity is routed only to one partner.

Summary Page: Summary pages, which are a list of marketing objects, appear under many tabs and horizontal navigation links. To view a marketing object's details, click the object's name.

Tab: Main divisions within the user interface of Oracle Partner Management.

TAP: Territory Assignment Program. This is a CRM common module that enables businesses to allocate resources based on territory definitions.

TCA or Trading Community Architecture: Oracle's single customer database architecture for all types of customers.

Value Added Distributor (VAD): A business that buys one or more products from a manufacturer, and adds value to it before reselling to a reseller or consumer.

Vendor: A business entity that is engaged in the activity of selling products and/or providing services to the market place.

Workflow

Oracle Workflow automates and continuously improves business processes, routing information of any type according to business rules you can change. Oracle Workflow manages business processes according to rules that you define. The rules, which we call a workflow process definition, include the activities that occur in the process and the relationship between those activities. An activity in a process definition can be an automated function defined by:

a PL/SQL stored procedure or an external function

a notification to a user or role that they may request a response

a business event

a subflow that itself is made up of many activities.

Workflow Attributes: Workflow attributes control the behavior of the workflow.

Workflow Monitor: The workflow monitor is a Java based tool used for administering and viewing workflow process.