Essential Building Blocks of Siebel Assignment Manager

Siebel Assignment Manager consists of several essential building blocks. This topic provides a brief description of these building blocks, each of which is described in greater detail in other chapters throughout this guide.

Assignment Rules

An assignment rule is a logical collection of business conditions, and Assignment Manager evaluates potential candidates based on these rules. For example, assume that the U.S. Western Sales Representative position is responsible for sales of Products A, B, and C in ZIP Codes 94401, 94402, and 94403.

In Siebel Assignment Manager, this example translates as follows:

• An assignment rule exists for the U.S. Western region.

• The assignment rule candidate is the U.S. Western Sales Representative.

• One criterion for the assignment rule includes only those accounts with ZIP Codes 94401, 94402, and 94403.

• Another criterion for the assignment rule includes only products in the Product A, B, or C product line.

Siebel Assignment Manager uses assignment rules to match assignment objects to candidates. Multiple assignment rules can be active for each assignment object. An assignment rule can also apply to multiple objects.

Assignment rules use criteria and scores to rate candidates and select potential assignees. Candidates that qualify for an assignment rule have the assignment rule score added to their total score. For example, if you have an assignment rule with the Score field set to 20 points, then each candidate that meets the rule's criteria has 20 points applied to his or her total score.

Each assignment rule also has a candidate passing score value. After the total score for a candidate is calculated, Assignment Manager compares this score with the candidate passing score for the assignment rule. If a candidate's score is less than the candidate passing score, then the candidate does not meet the criteria and is not assigned.

Assignment Objects

In Siebel Assignment Manager, assignment objects represent assignment entities to which candidates are matched based on assignment rules. The concept is analogous to business objects in Siebel Business Applications. You must associate every assignment rule with at least one assignment object.

Assignment Criteria and Criteria Values

Assignment criteria are the fundamental building blocks for assignment rules. You translate the assignment business logic that you determine into assignment criteria. Assignment rules use criteria to determine which candidates qualify as potential assignees. Criteria also determine which assignment rule is evaluated in assigning an object. An assignment rule can include none (zero), one, or many criteria.

An assignment criterion is usually defined along with criteria values. For example, assume that you want an assignment requirement that employees speak German. When you create your assignment rule, you select the predefined Language rule criterion and German (or DEU, which is the language code for German) as the criterion value.

You can have several criteria values for the same criterion. For example, assume that a Language rule criterion uses four languages as criteria values: German, Spanish, Italian, and French. Assuming that this assignment rule's candidate passing score is 10 points, and that each language is worth 5 points, the candidates for this assignment rule that possess expertise in at least two of these languages qualify for the assignment rule.

Assignment Manager provides predefined criteria values that are available dynamically based upon the criterion you select, or you can create your own criteria values using Siebel Tools. For example, if you want activities of type Repair or Break-fix handled by a certain employee, then create a rule criterion called Activity Type with two criteria values, Repair and Break-fix. For more information about creating new criteria with values, see "Process of Creating Assignment Criteria for Use in Assignment Rules".

Assignment Rule Groups

Assignment Manager allows you to group assignment rules, splitting them up by business function or other categories. An assignment rule group can include multiple assignment rules, however, an assignment rule can belong to only one rule group. You must associate each assignment rule with a rule group.

Tip: If you do not want to create your own rule groups, then you can associate all assignment rules to the Default Rule Group. The Default Rule Group is provided in the Assignment Manager seed data.

You can split rules and execute a subset of rules at any time. Typically, you want to split rules into rule groups based on business logic.

For example, you can have one set of business rules for assigning repair activities and another set of rules for assigning similar, but different, activities, such as appointment activities. In this situation, you could create two rule groups with five rules each. Then, when assigning a particular activity, you specify the rule group that you want Assignment Manager to process. Only the five rules from the rule group that you specified are processed during assignment of the activity, for example, the five repair activity rules.

Assignment Candidates

In Siebel Assignment Manager, candidates represent the people who or organizations that are evaluated as potential assignees for objects. Depending on the assignment rule that you use, and the object to which a candidate is assigned, candidates can be positions, employees, or organizations, and can be assigned as individuals or as members of a team. Alternatively, you can associate all people or all organizations defined in the database as candidates for a rule. You can also specify a particular candidate or one member of a team as the primary assignee on a specific assignment rule.

Static Versus Dynamic Candidates

When processing rules, Assignment Manager determines potential candidates either statically or dynamically. Assignment Manager determines candidates statically in these cases:

• When candidates are explicitly added to an assignment rule.

• When the All People or All Organizations flags are checked on an assignment rule.

• When qualifying candidates based on their skills.

Static candidates do not change as Assignment Manager processes rules (unless you intentionally associate other, different candidates) whereas dynamic candidates are identified during assignment.

Dynamic candidates can come from different, but related business entities. For example, Assignment Manager can assign an activity related to an asset and then dynamically generate a candidate list from the asset team.

Assignment Manager determines dynamic candidates as potential assignees for objects from an attribute on the object row. For example, assume that you have an activity that is associated to an asset. The asset, in turn, is associated with a list of employees. You might want Assignment Manager to treat the list of employees associated with the asset as potential candidates for assignment of that activity. In this situation, the potential candidates are dynamic candidates because they are not statically associated with an assignment rule; instead, they are identified during assignment.

Also note that, if the activity is later associated with a different asset that is associated with a different set of employees, then the list of potential candidates for the same activity can change during the next assignment.

In summary, the following points explain how static candidate assignment differs from dynamic candidate assignment:

• For static candidate assignment, candidates for each assignment rule are loaded when the server processes start up.

• For dynamic candidate assignment, candidates are retrieved from related business entities (attribute team table) with respect to the object row during an assignment.

Employee Candidates

Employees represent candidates distinguished by their skills and product expertise and are typically used as candidates in service organizations. For example, a service organization would want to assign employees with the proper skills and expertise to objects, because these employees possess specific skills that are related to the service request or activity. Assignment Manager can also take into account a specific employee's work schedule, calendar, and regional schedule when determining assignments by creating rules based on an employee's availability. For more information about availability-based assignment, see Chapter 11, "Availability-Based Assignment."

Position Candidates

Positions represent candidates distinguished by their job functions and are typically used as candidates in sales organizations. For example, a sales organization would want to assign positions to objects, because these positions are responsible for a region or territory.

By assigning positions to objects, you can have one sales representative inherit the opportunities, accounts, and contacts from another representative by reassigning the employee responsible for a specific position.

Note: An assignment object can be either position-based or employee-based, but not both. Assignment Manager does not support assignment of employees and positions to the same assignment object.

Organization Candidates

An organization represents a group of positions that has limited visibility to particular application data. For example, your company can create separate and distinct organizations to distribute specific information to organizational groups both inside and outside of your enterprise. Both internal and external users are granted access only to the information that the organization wants them to be able to see (such as accounts, opportunities, and contacts) and to the data that these users need to see (such as price lists, products, and literature).

By assigning objects to organizations, you can maintain better security and promote proper business practices by controlling data access and visibility between different organizations. For example, you can limit your distributors' data access by giving them visibility to product information, but restricting their visibility to price lists for the products. To restrict price list visibility, you can create a separate organization for your distributors that does not have access to the price list data. In this case, the price lists are not available to your distributors even if they are assigned to the products.

Some objects allow the assignment of a single organization, whereas other objects allow the assignment of multiple organizations to the same object. For more information about which candidates can be assigned to each of the predefined assignment objects, see Table 4-3.

Teams Versus Individual Candidates

A team represents a group of employees or positions. Assigning a team allows you to assign a group of individuals that possess various skills or job functions to a particular object.

In sales organizations, teams are typically assigned to objects. For example, you can assign a sales representative and a sales consultant to an opportunity. Alternately, you can assign a team of sales professionals (such as two district representatives, a regional manager, and a sales engineer) to work a single, large sales opportunity.

An individual represents a single employee or a position. Assigning individuals allows you to assign exclusive ownership to an individual who possesses a specific skill or expertise for a particular object.

In service organizations, individuals are typically assigned to objects. For example, you can assign a customer service representative with expertise in disk drives to all service requests that are marked for this area.

Assignment objects can be team-based, individual-based, or both. That is, the same assignment object can be team-based for employees and individual-based for organizations.

Table 4-3 shows which candidates can be assigned to some of the predefined assignment objects. This table also shows which assignment objects are restricted to a single assignee, and assignment objects that are capable of incorporating a team of assignees. S indicates the ability to allow only single owner assignments; M indicates the ability to allow multiple owners or team assignments.

Table 4-3 Individual Versus Team Assignments Listed by Assignment Object

Assignment Object	Employee Candidate	Position Candidate	Organization Candidate
Account	Not applicable	M	M
Activity	M	Not applicable	Not applicable
Campaign	Not applicable	M	M
Campaign Contact	Not applicable	S	S
Contact	Not applicable	M	M
Opportunity	Not applicable	M	M
Product Defect	S	Not applicable	Not applicable
Project	M	Not applicable	M
Project Team	M	Not applicable	Not applicable
Service Request	S	Not applicable	M
TM Account	Not applicable	M	Not applicable
TM Asset	Not applicable	M	Not applicable
TM Contact	Not applicable	M	Not applicable

Note: If you want to assign different candidates, such as assign accounts to employees or assign projects to positions, then you have to configure the assignment object using Siebel Tools. For more information about this, see "Creating Assignment Objects".

Primary Assignees

A primary assignee (also referred to as a primary) on an assignment rule represents the candidate (employee, position, or organization) that is assigned as the primary owner, or main owner, of an assignment object if the candidate passes the criteria for that object. This assigned primary is usually the highest-scoring assignee from the highest-scoring assignment rule.

Alternatively, you can configure Assignment Manager to assign one member of a team as the primary assignee. In addition, you can manually assign a particular candidate as the primary assignee on a specific assignment rule.

Note: For assignments that allow only single assignees, the single assignee also becomes the primary assignee.