Planning Your Siebel Assignment Manager Implementation

This chapter provides guidelines for planning your Siebel Assignment Manager deployment and scenarios for various types of implementation. It includes the following topics:

Guidelines for Planning Your Siebel Assignment Manager Implementation

This topic provides high-level guidelines for planning your Siebel Assignment Manager implementation.

Typically, business or functional teams verify and confirm the requirements before assignment administrators begin planning assignment rule creation. The requirements include:

Make sure that all the current business requirements and data routing (by way of Assignment Manager) is captured for the deployment.
When applicable, define strategies to leverage the existing implementation when additional organizations decide to use Assignment Manager in the future.
For example, your current deployment might only include telesales, marketing, and customer care users, but in the future you might want to include other users, such as those for quality assurance, email response, and so on.
Identify the business requirements and map those requirements to Assignment Manager features, such as assignment rule groups, rule sequencing, exclusivity, scoring, multitiered assignment, workload distribution, dynamic candidates, delegated assignment, and so on.
Map Assignment Manager deployment modes.
For example, your deployment mapping might include assigning service requests interactively, assigning opportunities dynamically, assigning accounts and assets using batch mode, assigning contacts using batch contact denormalization, and so on.

It is recommended that assignment administrators develop operational plans based on business requirements and the frequency of assignment using Assignment Manager features, such as load splitter configuration, reporting mode, and so on.

Planning Your Siebel Assignment Manager Deployment

This topic provides a high-level overview for planning your Siebel Assignment Manager deployment. Investing appropriate time in analyzing the incoming data and loading data appropriately for the first time can reduce performance and other problems moving forward.

Use the following points to help plan your deployment:

Develop a migration path from an external source to Siebel Assignment Manager and, if using territory management, then also carefully plan import of external alignment rules.
Note: This task is particularly important if your implementation has mobile users.
Use assignment rule groups to manage large numbers of rules.
Use rule sequencing to prioritize rules by order of importance.
This feature can be helpful for Assignment Manager newly imported from an external system, because you can execute batch assignment against just the newly imported rules.
Use server key mappings to run multiple instances of Assignment Manager with different groups of rules loaded.
Create custom criteria for date fields (called date criteria).
Date criteria allow you to specify additional selectivity while assigning particular objects, such as creation date, expiration date, and so on.
If your assignment rules are static (that is, less frequently changing), then consider using dynamic assignment instead of batch assignment.
Identify opportunities where you can reduce assignment rules, such as:
- Reusing assignment rules across objects
- Using skills
- Setting up dynamic candidates

For more information about how to reduce assignment rules, see Planning Optimal Assignment Rules.

Guidelines for Creating Assignment Rules

To use Siebel Assignment Manager effectively, assignment administrators (AAs) must develop and document a clear set of strategies that are consistently applied by Assignment Manager or system administrators.

For each assignment object, consider how to develop assignment rules that:

Optimally match the attributes of assignment objects to criteria values of the assignment rules.
This approach is commonly used for traditional territory assignment where territories are managed exclusively through assignment administration. Employees, positions, or organizations associated with these rules are potential assignees. Sales organizations typically use this method.
Optimally match the attributes of assignment objects to employee skills.
Expertise is managed using employee, position, or organization skills. Service organizations typically use this method.
Reflect a blend of the attributes outlined in the two methods previously described.
For example, sales organizations can benefit from assignment rules using employee skills as well as territory rules.

Planning Optimal Assignment Rules

In general, the fewer assignment rules, the better. When you use fewer assignment rules, you achieve the following long-term gains:

Reduce maintenance. The assignment administrator (AA) has fewer rules to manage, thus reducing time spent on checking quality of assignment rules.
Scalability. When new organizations or divisions require Assignment Manager capability, there is no need to rewrite the existing rules to accommodate the new requirements.
Reduce system resources. Assignment Manager, like other processing applications, is resource intensive. By reducing the number of assignment rules, the amount of system resources required are minimized including database, Siebel Server, and the time window for territory alignments.
Enhance performance. Assignment processing and throughput is increased when there are fewer rules because the Assignment Manager engine has a limited dataset to work on.

For normalization purposes, use the following guidelines to optimize your assignment rules:

Avoid duplication of assignment rules across objects.
For example, an account rule and a professional rule might have the same position assigned (within the same ZIP Code, or other postal code). In this case, you can collapse these two assignment rules into a single rule.
For custom assignment criteria with similar values across multiple objects, build a single criteria so that you can consolidate assignment rules.
Consolidate positions across multiple assignment rules.
After assignment rules are created, determine the 10 most popular positions used in assignment rules. If one or more positions are used in more than 90% of the assignment rules, then you might want to consider alternate paths.

With a skills model, consider using the built-in Assignment Manager skills feature. Although it is typically used within a Call Center implementation, this feature can also be leveraged for a sales implementation.

Note: Although it is recommended that you keep your assignment rules to a minimum, you must continually weigh the advantages of ease of administration with loss of performance as they apply to your particular deployment.

Examples for Optimizing Assignment Rules

Use the following examples to assist you in determining the number of assignment rules for your implementation.

Sales Example

A telecommunications sales company is planning their Assignment Manager implementation based on the following data:

There are 1,200 potential territories for the geographic and product lines served.
There are 600 sales people working these territories.

Ideally, this company would define no more than 600 assignment rules, which is the lower of the two numbers. However, if this company plans to use additional Assignment Manager features, such as dynamic candidates, scoring, skills, and so on, then the company might consider reducing its rule count even further.

Service Example

An appliance services company is planning their Assignment Manager implementation based on the following data:

There are 100 potential geographic territories for their product line and different service products.
The product line includes refrigerators, washing machines, air conditioning units, and so on. The services the company provides include: preventive maintenance, extended warranty coverage, and so on.
There are 1,600 field technicians working with customers in these territories.

Ideally, this company would define no more than 100 assignment rules, which is the lower of the two numbers. However, if this company plans to use additional Assignment Manager features, such as dynamic candidates, scoring, skills, and so on, the company might consider reducing its rule count even further.

In summary, when you create assignment rules, identify the logical territories and the people participating in these territories, and then determine how you can best optimize your Assignment Manager deployment.

Scenarios for Using Siebel Assignment Manager

Several scenarios are provided as examples of how you might use Siebel Assignment Manager. Your company might follow a different process according to its business requirements.

Scenario for Using Assignment Manager in Sales Organizations

This scenario gives one example of how you can use Assignment Manager in a sales organization. You might use Assignment Manager differently, depending on your business model.

Sales organizations typically have to distribute opportunities and accounts to the proper people within the organization. Assignment of sales opportunities must take place quickly so that sales representatives can respond to potential revenue-generating opportunities. Information must also be readily available to salespeople to close the maximum number of sales possible.

Assignments in sales organizations are commonly made to positions responsible for a territory. Mobile salespeople, who are not connected to a network, can share information and work as a collaborative sales force on sales opportunities. Sales organizations can therefore use the talents of their salespeople within their entire organization.

Siebel Assignment Manager allows you to create territories for positions using a wide variety of criteria. By assigning objects to positions, you can have one sales representative inherit the opportunities, accounts, and contacts from another sales representative by reassigning the employee responsible for a specific position.

After you have created the territories using assignment criteria, a major territory realignment can negatively affect your system resources. If the realignment is large, Assignment Manager might create a volume of transactions for Mobile Web Clients, which increases synchronization time drastically. To avoid this problem, you can run a database extract server task (DbXtract) again and have the Mobile Web Clients initialize their local databases. Because the time required to run a database extract server task for multiple clients can be significant, try to coordinate territory realignments with database extracts to occur during a time of low system utilization.

Because sales organizations typically distribute their accounts and opportunities based on territories, create sales assignment rules based on these territories.

For more information about:

Territory alignments, see Siebel Territory Management Guide.
Database extracts, see Siebel Remote and Replication Manager Administration Guide.
Running server tasks, see Siebel System Administration Guide.

Scenario for Using Assignment Manager in Service Organizations

This scenario gives one example of how you can use Assignment Manager in a service organization. You might use Assignment Manager differently, depending on your business model.

In a service organization, service requests can often be resolved by the first customer service representative (CSR) who services the customer. However, when the request cannot be resolved, or when the service request is logged through the Internet, ownership must be transferred to a service representative who possesses the expertise to handle the request.

In this environment, it becomes critical to assign employees with the proper expertise and skills to service requests. Therefore, assign employees to objects because some employees possess specific skills that are different from those of other CSRs or field service engineers. When service representatives are on vacation, are promoted, or assume different responsibilities, work assigned to these employees must be reassigned based on the skills and workloads of other employees in the service organization.

Scenario for Using Assignment Manager in Marketing Organizations

This scenario gives one example of how you can use Assignment Manager in a marketing organization. You might use Assignment Manager differently, depending on your business model.

In a marketing organization, you want to route responses from a new product campaign appropriately to the telesales team responsible for handling the campaign. In this case, the assignment administrator creates assignment rules using the Campaign assignment object, with Product and Workload criteria, to make sure that there is a fair distribution of leads to telesales personnel.