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Administering Oracle CRM On Demand > Business Process Management > Data Rules and Assignment > About Assignment Rules

About Assignment Rules

Before you begin. To set up the assignment rules, your role must include the Data Rules and Assignment privilege.

Assignment rules allow you to automatically assign a lead, an opportunity, a service request, or an account to the appropriate person, team, and territory, based on the rules (called rule groups) that you set up.

If your company has selected the group assignment option, all group members share the records you assign to a member of that group. For more information, see Group Management.

Depending on your company's structure and business processes, assignment rules can be simple. For example:

• Sales leads for each geographic region are assigned to the regional sales manager.
• New service requests are assigned to the technical service manager.

Or, the rules can be more complex. For example:

• Most leads are assigned by product expertise and geographic location, but some are assigned to a telemarketing manager.
• Most service requests are assigned by problem area, but all requests involving a particular product are routed to one person.

The following table describes how you can assign record types:

The assignment rules in the active rule group are evaluated when the following occurs in relation to a record type:

• For leads: The Reassign Owner check box is selected and the change is saved.
• For service requests:
  • The service request is created without an owner or the owner is deleted from the record (that is, the Owner field is blank).
  • The Reassign Owner check box is selected and the change is saved.
• For accounts: The Reassign Owner check box is selected and the change is saved.
• For opportunities: The Reassign Owner check box is selected and the change is saved.

NOTE: The assignment manager attempts to reassign a record immediately after the Reassign Owner check box is selected on the record and the record is saved. However, when a lead record is being converted to an account or opportunity, any attempt to reassign the account or opportunity fails because the assignment manager cannot reassign the record until the lead is fully converted. For example, using a workflow rule to select the Reassign Owner check box, or setting a default value on the account or opportunity when the lead is being converted, does not result in the record being reassigned. You must instead reassign the record manually by selecting the Reassign Owner check box on the converted record after the record is fully converted.

Email Notifications

When a lead or service request is assigned an owner, an email is sent to the new owner. The template that is used for the email is determined by the language that is selected in the Personal Detail page of the new owner. For example, if the user wants to receive the notification emails in Spanish, then Spanish must be selected in the Language field on the user's Personal Detail page. You can turn off email notification for service requests on a rule basis by deselecting the Send Email Notification check box (flag) on the Service Request Assignment Rule Edit page. For information about updating assignment rules, see Setting Up Assignment Rules.

In the email notifications, the From address is always donotreply@crmondemand.com and the Sender field is set to the address that you specify in the Return E-mail field on the assignment rule group. Oracle CRM On Demand appends a string to each email so that the email can be tracked in the email delivery system at Oracle. If an email recipient responds to an email notification, then the To field in the reply is set to the address that you specify in the Return E-mail field on the assignment rule group.

Tracking the Reassignment Process

You can use three fields to help you to track the owner reassignment process, or to run analyses to determine how long the reassignment process takes. You can add these fields to Account, Opportunity, Lead, and Service Request page layouts. The fields are:

• Assignment Status

  The status can be Queued (the record is in the queue to be processed by assignment manager), or Processing (the record is currently being processed by assignment manager), or blank (the record is neither in the queue or being processed).

• Last Assignment Submission Date

  If the record is queued for processing or is currently being processed by assignment manager, this field shows the date and time the record was saved with the Reassign Owner check box selected. However, in the case of a service request record, this field shows the date and time the record was saved with the Owner field blank.

• Last Assignment Completion Date

  If a record has never been reassigned, this field is blank; otherwise, the field shows the date and time the record was last reassigned.

For more information on adding fields to page layouts, see Customizing Static Page Layouts.

Making Rule Groups Active

You can create multiple assignment rule groups, but only one rule group can be active at a time for each record type.

CAUTION: The rule group that was marked active the last time that the rules were released continues to be active until the rules are released again. When the rules are next released, the rule group that was most recently marked active becomes active. When you create a new rule group, and mark it active, do not delete the previously active rule group until after the rules have been released.

TIP:  Rule groups can serve as historical reference for the leads. Instead of deleting rule groups, you can mark them as inactive.

About Group Assignment

If your company assigns records to entire groups instead of one employee, your company administrator must:

1. Select the Default Group Assignment field in the Company Profile page (see Setting Up Your Company Profile and Global Defaults).
2. Set up the groups before activating the assignment rules (see Setting Up Groups).
3. Select one member in the group to be the owner for accounts or opportunities during the assignment procedure.

   NOTE: The group functionality is not supported for lead or service request records.

When the record is assigned to an owner in the group:

• The Owner field shows the owner's information.
• The Primary Group field shows the group name that the owner belongs to on the record Edit and Detail pages, if the company administrator added the field to the layout.
• The record appears in the areas of the applications that normally display that employee's records, such as Homepages and record lists.

Generally, all members in the group have full access to the record, although access levels can be adjusted to restrict a user's access.

About Assignment Manager and Record Ownership Modes

The assignment manager can reassign records only to users. It can reassign records only if the record type is configured in the user mode or mixed mode of record ownership. If there is a primary custom book assigned to the record before the assignment manager reassigns the record to an owner, then the assignment manager removes the primary book from the record. The assignment manager cannot reassign records if the record type is configured in book mode. If you configure a record type in book mode, then it is strongly recommended that you make all rule groups for that record type inactive. For more information about record ownership modes, see About Record Ownership Modes.

Scenario for Assigning Leads

The following is an example of a typical company's business rules for assigning leads. To set up the rules that automatically assign this company's leads, the administrator does the following:

1. States the company's business rules for assigning leads to people.

   For example, for accounts in the U.S., many sales territories are assigned by state, but in certain states, the product expertise determines the territory assignments. In addition, Corporation XYZ account is always assigned to one particular sales manager regardless of the lead's state or product interest.

2. Lists all of the assignment scenarios that are necessary to cover the business rules:
   • Account (company) is Corporation XYZ. Assign to Sales Manager A.
   • Primary Address - State is CA, NV, OR, WA. Assign to Sales Manager B.
   • Primary Address - State is OH, IN, MI, NY, KY. Assign to Sales Manager C.
   • Lead is interested in the ABC Product (in all states except those listed already, and not for Corporation XYZ). Assign to Sales Manager D.
   • Primary Address - State is not listed. Assign to Sales Manager E.
3. Puts the scenarios in the order in which they are to be considered.

   First, examine the Account field. If the value is Corporation XYZ, assign the lead to Sales Manager A, regardless of any other conditions. If this criterion is not matched, examine the Primary Address State field. If the value is CA, NV, OR, or WA, assign the lead to Sales Manager B, and so on.

As a best practice, use the Record Assignment Template to help you plan your company's assignment scenarios, and to set up rules that give you the results you want.

Criteria Conditions in Assignment Rules

You can use the following conditions in the criteria on assignment rules:

• Between. Matches the rule to records where the value in the criterion field is between two values defined on the rule criterion. (The results do not include records where the value in the criterion field is equal to one of the values on the rule.) Use a comma to separate the values. Do not use a dash (-) to specify a value range or to separate values.

  Use the Between condition for date fields only. Use the MM/DD/YYYY date format.

• Contains all values. Matches the rule to records where the value in the criterion field matches the exact values. The application does not retrieve substrings of the values, or the same value with different capitalization. You can enter a single value or multiple values separated by commas.
• Contains exact field value. Matches the rule to records where the criterion field contains all of the string in the criterion field value, and no additional characters. For example, if you enter Closed as the criterion value, the rule is matched to records where the criterion field value is Closed, but not records where the criterion value is Closed/won.

  You cannot use the Contains exact field value condition for date fields or number fields.

• Contains none of the values. Matches the rule to records where the criterion field contains any values that are not equal to the rule criterion value.

  You cannot use the Contains none of the values condition for date fields or number fields.

• Less than or equal to. Matches the rule to records where the value in the criterion field is less than or equal to the rule criterion value.

  You can use the Less than or equal to condition for number fields and currency fields only.

• Greater than or equal to. Matches the rule to records where the value in the criterion field is greater than or equal to the rule criterion value.

  You can use the Greater than or equal to condition for number fields and currency fields only.

Note the following points regarding rule criteria:

• A rule without criteria always succeeds.
• Rules are evaluated in sequential order, and evaluation stops when the criteria on a rule are met.

For example, if ten rules are being evaluated and the criteria on rule 6 are met, then rules 7, 8, 9, and 10 are ignored (that is, they are not evaluated). Similarly, if there are no criteria on rule 6, rule 6 succeeds, and rules 7, 8, 9, and 10 are ignored.

For step-by-step instructions on how to set up assignment rules, see Setting Up Assignment Rules.