Siebel Territory Management Guide > Activating and Maintaining Territory Alignments >

Using the Periodic Runs Workflow to Maintain Territory Alignments

In day-to-day operations, contact, account, and asset records are added, deleted, and changed. You want to make sure that as changes are made to these records, your territory alignment is updated accordingly.

For example, when a new account is added, when a contact's primary specialty changes, or when an asset is moved to a new address, you want to have the sales team or owner for the record updated automatically and within a short period of time.

To maintain the alignment, you set up the Periodic Runs workflow to run the alignment rules in batch mode at regular intervals, for example, once a day or once a week.

This workflow:

• Converts global conditions from a dummy alignment into a TOS search specification and invokes the TOS service.
• Passes the resulting filtered object ids to an Assignment Manager Batch job.
• Finds the Assignment Manager rule group based on the Hierarchy and Division, and uses the same rule group while invoking the Assignment Manager Batch job.

As a result:

• Newly added objects are assigned to the appropriate positions.
• Changed objects that no longer satisfy the global conditions are dropped.

Before you can run this workflow, you must configure the Siebel application as described in Configuring the Periodic Runs Workflow to Use the Timestamp Filter

This task is a step in Roadmap for Using Siebel Territory Management.

Running the Periodic Runs Workflow without the Time-Stamp Filter

If you run the Periodic Runs workflow without the time-stamp filter, it processes all the data. For faster performance, you can run the Periodic Runs workflow with the time-stamp filter, as described below.

To run the Periodic Runs workflow without the time-stamp filter

1. Activate the workflow Alignment - Periodic Runs.
2. Create a new alignment with the same global conditions as previous active alignment.

   This dummy alignment need not have rules. It must use the same Hierarchy and Division combination as the previous active alignment. It must be an intermediate alignment.

   NOTE:  The dummy alignment must contain all the global conditions from the most recent active alignment in the hierarchy and division. The activation date of the dummy alignment must be either the current date or earlier than the activation date of the most recent active alignment in the hierarchy and division.

3. Get the row Id of this alignment.
4. Create a batch job for Workflow Process Manager with the parameters shown in the following table.

   Parameter	Value
   Workflow Process Alignment	Periodic Runs
   Object Id	The alignment ID you got in Step 3

5. Submit the job

   You can create the job as repeating instance, for example at every 24 hour interval. Each time the job is run, all the new account, contact, asset, and opportunity records will be assigned based on the rules and local conditions in the previous active alignment.

Running the Periodic Runs Workflow with the Time-Stamp Filter

If you run the Periodic Runs workflow with the time-stamp filter, it processes only the incremental data more recent than the time stamp. Because it does not process all the data, it takes less time to run.

To run the Periodic Runs workflow with the time-stamp filter

1. Activate the workflow Alignment - Periodic Runs.
2. Create a new alignment with the same global conditions as previous active alignment.

   This dummy alignment need not have rules. It must use the same Hierarchy and Division combination as the previous active alignment. It must be an intermediate alignment.

   NOTE:  The dummy alignment must contain all the global conditions from the most recent active alignment in the hierarchy and division. The activation date of the dummy alignment must be either the current date or earlier than the activation date of the most recent active alignment in the hierarchy and division.

3. Get the row Id of this alignment.
4. Navigate to the Admin-Business Service screen, then the Simulator view.
5. Create a new record with the values shown in the following table.

   Field	Value
   Service Name	Server Requests
   Method	Submit Request

6. Provide input for the record.
   1. Create an .xml file with the following content:

   <PropertySet

   Method="RunProcess"

   Component="WfProcMgr"

   Mode="DirectDb"

   ><PropertySet

   Object Id="88-2ARGD"

   ProcessName="Alignment - Periodic Runs"

   LastModified Timestamp ="5/11/2010 04:42:58"

   ></PropertySet

   ></PropertySet

   Object Id = <Alignment Id of Dummy Intermediate alignment>

   LastModified Timestamp = <A timestamp after which the objects are modified have to be considered for assignment/de-assignment>

   NOTE:  LastModified Timestamp must be in the format MM/DD/YYYY HH:mm:ss using a 24hr clock.

   2. In the business service input applet, select Load From File, and select this .xml file.