This chapter covers the following topics:
Programs are used to segment partners and provide them with benefits. Vendors can create programs for existing partners as well as new partners. Vendors can also recruit and maintain partners with specific incentive packages. This helps increase and maintain a strong partner community that further helps to increase overall market share and revenues.
Vendors can also customize programs to recruit new partners and motivate existing partners. Programs can be created for groups of partner types, for example, Value Added Resellers (VARs), Original Equipment Manufacturers, and Prospects.
Vendors can organize and offer specific benefits to partners. Benefits such as sales opportunities, product information, marketing collateral, services, and training can be grouped within a program. Partners can gain access to the benefits by enrolling into a program that provides these benefits.
Examples of benefits that can be associated with a partner program include the following:
Referrals - A partner refers business to the vendor and receives compensation when the referral is converted to an order.
Deal Registrations - A partner registers a deal with the vendor for non-competition purposes.
Special Pricing Requests - A partner requests discounts for newly purchased inventory or to move existing inventory.
Fund Requests - A partner requests funds to carry out certain marketing activities.
Opportunity Management - A partner is made eligible to receive opportunities from the vendor.
Partner programs consist of numerous features, many of which are available through integrations with other Oracle applications. During implementation, and as part of ongoing administration, a channel administrator is responsible for the following tasks:
Setting up program types and specifying program approvers
Creating inventory items for a program that has a membership fee associated with it
Specifying price lists to be used for programs
Setting up payment methods based on a partner's geography
Setting up program benefits, such as opportunity management, special pricing, or deal referral and registration
Making sure that program contracts have been set up in Oracle Contract Management
Setting up mandatory and locking rules
Adjusting channel managers' permissions in Oracle Content Management, which is used to store partner program overview information
Specifying the type of text editor to be used to create partner program overviews
Mapping partner responsibilities to programs
After the channel administrator's partner program set up tasks are completed, channel managers have all the tools they need to create and manage actual partner programs. For information on creating and managing partner programs, refer to the Oracle Partner Management Vendor Users Guide.
The channel administrator is responsible for specifying the program types that will be available for program creation. A program type defines the type of partners that can enroll in the program (for example, distributors, VADs, or resellers) and identifies certain users as program approvers. The approvers will be responsible for approving new programs created by channel managers. A program must be approved before partners can enroll in it.
The Oracle Marketing Approvals Framework (AMS: Generic Approval Framework) is used to route approval requests and notifications, and get approvals. For a user to be available as a partner program approver, he must be set up as an approver in the Oracle Marketing approvals framework. For more information on the framework, see Oracle Marketing Implementation Guide.
Use this procedure to set up a program type.
Navigation
Log on with the channel administrator responsibility and navigate to Partner tab > Programs > Program Type, then click Create Type to access the Create Partner Program Type page.
Prerequisites
None.
Notes
Partner Types: The partner types available in this list are determined by the types of partners specified in the Partner Type partner profile attribute. You can select multiple partner types.
Approvers: Specify one or more users who will be responsible for approving programs. Note that the approvers specified here are responsible for approving programs set up by channel managers. A different approval system is used to approve partner program enrollment requests.
Order: If multiple approvers are required, set up an approval order.
Type: Select User from the list, and then search for the user in the User Role field.
If the program creator and the approver are the same person, the program is approved automatically.
Frequently, partners must pay a fee before they can join a partner program. If a fee is associated with program enrollment, an order must be created for the program in Order Management; for an order to be created, the partner program must be set up as an inventory item in Oracle Inventory.
To automatically create inventory items for partner programs that have a membership fee (default behavior), for To set up partner programs in Oracle Inventory, the program administrator must complete the following:
Specify the master inventory organization in which programs will be stored.
Set the PV: Concatenated Inventory Flex Segments for Program profile option to add partner programs to Oracle Inventory.
If the vendor organization is implementing Oracle Partner Management as a standalone application, inventory categories and items might need to be set up as well. Refer to the Oracle Inventory Users Guide for more information.
Specify the unit of measure (UOM code) for the inventory item. Set the PV: Default UOM Code profile option value at the site level.
You can disable automatic creation of inventory items by setting the profile option PV: Enable Auto Creation of Inventory Items to No at the Site level. If automatic creation is disabled, vendors must manually associate a program with an inventory item for fee-based programs.
To do this, you must search for partner program inventory items by using the Inventory Item list of values. Because an organization can have a large number of items stored, and only some of the items are associated with partner programs, the inventory item LOV uses two profile options and inventory item attributes to identify potential partner program inventory items. These two profile options are used to filter out inventory items in the inventory LOV:
PV: Default UOM code
AMS: Item Validation Master Organization
Information on these two profile options appears in the next two sections.
The inventory LOV uses certain attributes to identify an inventory item as a potential partner program. The following values must be provided when creating a partner program as an inventory item:
Shippable = No
Customer ordered = Yes
Customer orders enabled = Yes
Invoicable item = Yes
Invoice enabled = Yes
Orderable on Web = No
When automatic creation of inventory items is disabled, because the partner program pricing is associated with the partner program inventory item, the program pricing must be set up in the Oracle Advanced Pricing application. When automatic creation is disabled, you can associate a partner program with an inventory item even without pricing set, but you cannot activate it until pricing is set up for the associated inventory item.
Earlier an inventory item was created automatically for each partner program. However, if a partner program does not have a fee, creating the inventory item is unnecessary, because the item is not orderable.
If a partner program is active and has enrollments, you cannot change the association between the inventory item and the partner program.
In order for a partner to successfully enroll in a program with a fee, the following must be performed:
Choose responsibility Oracle Pricing Manager > Setup > Event Phases.
Query for Sequence "0" and then click on the row for Batch Processing.
Make sure the column User Search Flag is set to "Yes".
If your enterprise has more than one operating unit, be sure that when you create an inventory item for a partner program, you make it available for all inventory organizations.
Oracle Partner Management uses the AMS: Item Validation Master Organization profile option to determine the master inventory organization in which partner programs will be stored as items. The profile setting should be the name of the organization and set at the Site level. If this profile is not set, then the user will see an error when accessing the inventory LOV if automatic creation of inventory item is disabled or when creating a program with fee if automatic creation of inventory item is enabled.
You must set the unit of measure for the inventory item by using the profile option PV: Default UOM Code at the Site level. This ensures that the unit of measure matches up with your inventory application. You should not change the UOM after implementation, because the UOM identifies the inventory item as a part of a partner program. If the UOM is changed, then older partner-related inventory items will no longer appear in the LOV. You must set the default UOM whether the inventory items are created automatically or manually.
The PV: Default UOM Code profile options is not shipped with any value, but you must set it to any UOM currently available in your inventory program or the application will create an error message.
Inventory items are added using a key flex field. Partner Management uses the PV: Concatenated Inventory Flex Segments for Program profile option to populate the flexfield with information. This information creates a partner program inventory item when automatic creation of inventory item is enabled. Oracle Inventory uses one of the segments in the flexfield to uniquely identify each inventory item; each Oracle application that sets up inventory items must populate this segment with information that uniquely identifies its items. Other segments in the flexfield are used to provide additional information about the item (such as company name or business unit).
To set this profile option properly, you need to determine the following:
What values must be specified in the segments that precede or follow the segment that uniquely identifies the inventory item.
The style of segment delimiter.
When you set the profile option, you specify appropriate values for the preceding or following segments and enter the code for the program. Then, you enter the value PV_PRGM_FLEX_CODE, which should be unique. This segment will be populated with a unique value to make the concatenation of segments unique for each inventory item that gets created.
For example, suppose that the vendor organization's Inventory key flexfield uses four segments to specify an inventory item, and uses "." as the delimiter:
Segment 1: Company name = VENDOR
Segment 2: Business unit = SOFTWARE
Segment 3: Business subunit = EBUS
Segment 4: Inventory item identifier
For this organization, the PV: Concatenated Inventory Flex Segment for Program profile option would be populated as follows VENDOR.SOFTWARE.EBUS.PV_PRGM_FLEX_CODE, where the PR_PRGM_FLEX_CODE concatenates the first five letters of the partner program's name with the program_id value, which is populated by the system when the partner program is created.
For a program called Distributors Gold Program, the inventory flexfield would be populated as follows:
VENDOR.SOFTWARE.EBUS.DISTRPV123, where “123” is the program_id assigned by the system.
Partners might be charged to enroll into a partner program. Thus, a price needs to be defined for program inventory items in one ore more price lists, which then can be used to determine the appropriate program price for each partner. When the channel manager creates a partner program, he selects which price list or price lists will be used for the program. If the pricing setup can result in finding duplicate prices for a program inventory item, the channel manager must define precedence so that the price with the lowest precedence is selected.
Partner Programs can be priced using either the Oracle Advanced Pricing or the Oracle Order Management application. The channel administrator specifies which application is used by setting the profile option QP: Source System Code. This profile is set at the Application level; when the profile is set, the value provided is the name of the pricing application to be used.
For more information on setting up pricing, refer to Oracle Advanced Pricing User's Guide or the Oracle Marketing Implementation Guide.
A variety of payment methods can be set up to help partners pay program enrollment fees conveniently. Payment methods can include cash, credit, check, purchase order, wire transfer, or invoice.
Payment methods are set up based on geographical regions, which allows the vendor to set up different payment options for partners located in different countries or regions, if necessary. The geographic regions used to specify payment options are set up in Oracle Marketing. Geographic information may already be set up for your implementation. However, if it is not, it can be set up by a user with Oracle Marketing administration access. Refer to the Oracle Marketing Implementation and Administration Guide for additional information.
Use this procedure to add a payment rule to specify available payment methods by geographic regions from the Payment Option Details page. Note: This setup is not mandatory. If there is no payment rule defined, all of the enabled payment types in PV_PAYMENT_TYPE lookup are available for all partners, assuming that payment types set up in Order Management are the same for all the orgs.
Navigation
Log on as the channel administrator and navigate to Partner tab > Programs > Payment Methods, and then click Add Payment Rule to access the Payment Option Details page
Prerequisites
None.
Notes
Geography Level: Indicates the level at which the payment option applies, for example, country or state.
Geographic Region: Further defines the geographic information. The regions options are determined by the Geography Level selected previously. For example, if you select Country as the Geography Level, the Lookup for Geographic Region lists all countries stored in the Oracle Marketing application.
Select Payment Method: When creating a payment method rule, LOV will list only the payment types that are enabled in the PV_PAYMENT_TYPE lookup. This lookup is shipped with all the payment types enabled.
For wire transfer, you must set the Allow Multiple Payments system parameter to Yes in Oracle Order Management for each operating unit that is associated with a partner responsibility.
A benefit is a feature of a program that provides value to a partner, for example:
Access to funds for marketing or other promotional activities
Ability to request special pricing
Incentives for referring business to the vendor
Access to iStore
A benefit can be associated with one or more partner programs. Benefits are associated with partner programs, and are granted to a partner organization through partner program enrollment.
The channel administrator sets up benefits from the Benefit Administration page. When setting up a benefit, the administrator selects the type of benefit to be created from the list of available benefits, which include deal registration, soft fund, referral, and other. Numerous benefits of the same type can be set up; for example, the vendor might want to offer different soft fund benefits to different types of partners.
Setting up a soft fund (also referred to as a partner fund), deal registration, or referral benefit involves specifying additional steps, such as assigning a budget to the benefit or associating products with it. Additional information about creating a deal registration benefit, partner fund benefit, and referral benefit is presented in each benefit's specific chapter.
Opportunity management and special pricing functionality are also made available to partners through benefit creation. To set up these types of benefits (as well as benefits such as access to mailing lists or Oracle iStore), the channel manager creates a benefit of type Other. Refer to the chapters on Special Pricing and Opportunity Management for more information.
A benefit's status must be Active before it can be available for use in a partner program.
A locking rule locks a partner program field to further editing. More specifically a locking rule specifies that a field can not be edited when the partner program is in a certain status. For example, you might want to lock some fields after a program becomes Active.
Navigation
Log in as the channel administrator and navigate to Partner tab > Programs > Locking Rules.
Prerequisites
None.
Notes
Object Attribute: Select the flow for which you are creating the locking rule. The list of available fields is updated to reflect the fields contained in the flow selected.
System Status: Select the program status that will cause selected fields to become locked.
Certain fields are seeded in the locking rule and cannot be removed from the Selected Fields area.
Mandatory rules allow you to specify fields that are required for program creation. You can create mandatory rules for each feature or flow that you set up for a partner program.
Navigation
Log in as the channel administrator and navigate to Partner tab > Programs > Locking Rules.
Prerequisites
None.
Notes
Object Attribute: Select the feature or flow for which you are creating the mandatory rule. The list of available fields is updated to reflect the fields contained in the object attribute selected.
Certain fields are seeded in the mandatory rule and cannot be removed from the Selected Fields area.
A vendor can associate legal terms and conditions with membership in a partner program. Terms and conditions are listed in a contract template, which is presented to a partner user who is enrolling into the program. If the partner agrees to the terms, the partner user can electronically accept the terms and conditions or submit the signed contract to the vendor via fax or regular mail based on available contact response options to the partner's geography.
Oracle Partner Management integrates with the Oracle Contract Management, which allows the vendor to create and manage contract templates. A contract template can be attached to a program based on geography and member type. Member type can be used to present global partners with contracts that differ from contracts presented to standard or subsidiary partners.
In Oracle Partner Management, the contract template is displayed and not the actual contract. The program manager selects the type of contract templates or contracts that he wants to associate with a program and attaches it to a partner program. After the partner clicks on Accept/Print and Fax/Reject during the enrollment, a new contract is created.
Setting up program contracts involves two tasks:
Setting up contract templates
Setting up contract approval options
For a contract template to be available in Oracle Partner Management, the program manager or a user with access to Oracle Contract Management must create contract templates with the document type as Partner Program. Contract templates are created and stored in the Oracle Contract Management Core application.
When setting up a contract, indicate that the intent is Selling.
The legal terms that a vendor organization wants partners to agree to might differ based on a partner's geographic location, partner member type or partner user's language. Thus, numerous partner program contract templates may need to be set up in Oracle Contract Management. The channel manager then selects the contract templates that he wants to associate with a specific partner program based on geographic and partner member type criteria.
Oracle Partner Management integrates with Oracle Contracts to provide the terms and conditions that can be associated with membership in a partner program. Integration with Contracts Core provides Partner Management with a repository, or a library, of contract templates and clauses. Vendors can associate clauses with one or more contract templates. In addition, vendors can create localized versions of contract templates. Finally, Oracle Contracts provides a contract and clause approval mechanism, through Oracle Workflow Builder, that allows vendors to better control the content of terms and conditions.
If you have multiple organizations in your enterprise, contracts are identified by the organization in which they are created, but they can be used by a program manager in any organization or accepted by any partner user in any organization.
For example, associating a clause with more than one contract greatly reduces the amount of time spent entering and subsequently maintaining terms and conditions. In addition, vendors gain increased flexibility in how they can build templates, as they can add, remove, and rearrange clauses easily.
The Oracle Contracts integration also gives vendors the ability to create localized versions of a contract. This is an important enhancement for vendors that are bound by legal regulations to provide partners with contracts in their own languages. For example, in Canada, a vendor must be able to provide its partners with partner program terms and conditions in either English or French. Similarly, geographic-based contract response options helps vendors to comply with local or regional regulations. A translated version of a template must be in the same operating unit as the base template.
For more information on working with contracts, refer to the Oracle Contract Management Implementation Guide.
Some vendor organizations delay approving partner program enrollment requests until a signed contract is received from the partner. However, other organizations allow approvers to approve an enrollment request before the signed contract is received.
To specify whether or not an enrollment request can be approved without a signed contract, the channel administrator sets the profile option PV: Allow Approval without Contract:
Yes: Approver can approve the enrollment request before the signed contract is received.
No: If this value is selected, the approver needs to wait to receive the signed contract and update the contract status to Signed along with providing the contract signed date and contract binding contact information before approving the enrollment.
This setup is applicable for enrollments which have 'Print and Fax' contract response selected. If the partner electronically accepts the contracts while enrolling into the program, contract terms and conditions are accepted by the time enrollment is forwarded to the enrollment approver. If the partner rejects the contract terms and conditions, the partner won't be able to submit the enrollment, and therefore enrollment is not forwarded to the approver.
When a vendor user creates programs, he can create a program overview that provides partners with a summary of the program. The program overview is HTML content that is displayed to partners to help them understand program requirements, benefits, and so on. Channel managers set up the program overview, which can include images as well as text.
The content for the program overview is stored with the PV_PROGRAM_SUMMARY content type in the Oracle Content Manager application, although the text and images are entered by partner managers though Oracle Partner Management. During implementation, the administrator needs to perform two tasks (which are explained in detail in the following sections) to make sure that program overviews can be created and stored properly:
Adjust permissions in Oracle Content Manager so that channel managers can access and store program overview information.
Enable or disable rich text formatting for the overview, depending on business requirements.
Although the Oracle Content Manager application provides a content approval process, we are not using it in Oracle Partner Management. No separate approval is required for a program overview.
Use this procedure to grant access privileges to vendor users to create, update or approve the program summary.
Navigation
Log in to Oracle Content Management with the Content Super User responsibility.
Prerequisites
None
Steps:
From the Root directory level, select the PR_PRGM directory from the list of subdirectories.
Click Folder Properties. The Folder Properties page appears.
In the Permissions section, click Add Another Row, if necessary, and add the user (for example, the name of a channel manager), resource group, or responsibility for which you want to set up permissions.
Select the permission level:
To grant full access to the folder, select all the available permissions.
To restrict permissions, select the applicable permissions only.
For more information, see the Oracle Content Manager Implementation Guide.
A rich text editor can be used to create a program overview. The editor offers the ability to add images and formatting to a program overview, which can cause accessibility challenges for some users. The administrator can change the text editor used for the overview, if required, by changing the setting of the Self Service Accessibility Features profile option.
The following settings are available for the profile option:
NONE: Enables the rich text editor, and makes the accessibility-specific features unavailable.
Screen Reader Optimized: Content is optimized for reading on a computer screen.
Standard Accessibility: Accessibility compliant mode.
Partner user responsibilities can be associated with partner programs. When a partner organization's enrollment in a program is approved, the responsibilities associated with it are granted to the partner users. The channel administrator is responsible for mapping programs and responsibilities.
Mapping responsibilities to programs provides a way to make the information associated with a partner program visible to partner users from the Partner Dashboard. For example, when a partner organization becomes enrolled in a program that provides opportunity management benefit, the Opportunity Summary transaction link in the quick links bin becomes visible for the partner organization's users.
Responsibility mapping associates a responsibility with one of the two partner user roles: Primary User or Business User. To help vendor organizations further control the information available to partner users, geographic location can also be used to determine the responsibility that a partner user will receive. The geographic information available for responsibility mapping is set up in the Oracle Marketing application.
Some organizations choose to map the Partner Super User responsibility to all partner programs. Other organizations opt to create new responsibilities that allow them to limit what partner users can see.
To create a new partner responsibility, it is recommended that you start with the Partner Super User responsibility and exclude functions, as appropriate, to limit what the user can see.
The administrator must perform the following to make the responsibility available from the list of values that appears on the Create Responsibility Mapping Setup page:
Make sure that the responsibility's application is set to Partner Management.
Set the responsibility's profile option PV: Is External Responsibility to Yes at the responsibility level.
When the channel administrator adds, changes, or deletes a responsibility mapping rule, the concurrent program PV - Update user resp when resp mapping is created, updated, or deleted runs automatically. This program updates partner responsibilities, assigning or revoking responsibilities to partner users as appropriate.
When setting up role and responsibility mapping, an organization can use geographic criteria to further control the information that a partner user can access. The application matches the partner's identifying address to the most-granular geographic level. Thus, more than one responsibility and role combination can be mapped to a partner program, and the different responsibilities can be assigned to partner users based on the geographic location of the partner.
Use this procedure to map responsibilities to partner programs.
Prerequisites
The responsibility must be set up as a Oracle Partner Relationship Management responsibility with the profile option PV: Is External Responsibility set to Yes. Additionally, the partner program must be set up with the responsibility mapping rule if the responsibility needs to be assigned only upon enrollment into the program.
Navigation
Log in as the channel administrator and navigate to Programs > Responsibility Mappings and then click Create Mapping to display the Create Responsibility Mapping Setup page.
Notes
Geography: Select the geographic criteria that will be associated with the responsibility. The application will use the partner's geographic information (usually the identifying address) when assigning responsibilities.
Oracle Partner Management ships two responsibility mapping rules. While one is shipped with the geography level as World, user role as primary and responsibility as Default partner user, the other sets the geography level as World, user role as business and responsibility as Default partner user. This ensures that all partner users will automatically be assigned a role and responsibility, even if their organizations are not yet enrolled in a partner program. Customers can update the responsibilities for the seeded mapping rules or create more granular level default responsibility mapping rules.
Location: Select the location from the list. The location choices available in the list are determined by the Geography criteria selected previously.
There are a number of Trading Community Architecture (TCA) events and subscriptions associated with partner programs. These subscriptions expand the application without creating new code, and are not changed when an upgrade patch is applied. Some subscriptions are shipped with the application.
In TCA, for global and subsidiary relationships, the relationship types used are PARENT_OF and SUBSIDIARY_OF. Oracle Partner Management provides an asynchronous subscription for the following TCA business events. This keeps the member types up-to-date in PV tables with correct member type and terminates active partner program memberships when the global-subsidiary relationship is inactivated or activated outside of the PV application:
oracle.apps.ar.hz.relationship.update (subscription API - Pv_ptr_member_type_pvt.terminate_partner)
oracle.apps.ar.hz.relationship.create (subscription API - Pv_ptr_member_type_pvt.terminate_partner)
To adjust partner responsibilities appropriately when the partner primary address changes, Oracle Partner Management provides an asynchronous subscription to the following TCA business events.
oracle.apps.ar.hz.location.update (Pv_User_Resp_Pvt.manage_resp_on_address_change)
oracle.apps.ar.hz.PartySite.update (subscription API - Pv_User_Resp_Pvt.manage_resp_on_address_change)
To ensure that asynchronous subscriptions are run when an event occurs, run the concurrent program Workflow Agent Listener with the parameter WF_DEFERRED. Set this up to run every hour. This concurrent program is seeded in the request group of the responsibility System administrator. When this concurrent program is executed, every subscription from every instance of events in the DEFERRED queue at that moment is executed. The Workflow Agent Listener concurrent program is shipped as DISABLED.
When a partner is invited into a program, workflow sends out invitations to all the primary users of the partner organization. The workflow item type for this is PV: Partner Program Notifications and the workflow process used in the above item type is EVENT_NOTIF_PROCESS. This item type can be customized as needed.
There are certain system profile options that must be set for Partner Programs to function properly. In addition to the profile options mentioned in this chapter, there are additional profile options that may need to be set. Refer to Appendix A, System Profile Options, for a complete list of profile options for Partner Programs.
There are several Lookups that need to be set up for Partner Programs. Refer to Appendix B, Lookups, for additional information.
There are several concurrent programs that need to be run periodically for Partner Programs. Refer to Appendix C, Concurrent Programs, for information about setting up and running the programs.