Understanding Support Teams
This section discusses:
Support team maintenance.
Email notification.
Email lists.
Use support teams to better track the employees at a company that are associated with a contract. When setting up employees as team members, associate them with a function. When you add a support team to a contract, you gain visibility for who in your company is associated with a contract and in what capacity. For example, you can associate the contract with a salesperson, sales support person, contract administrator, project manager, receivables contact, and billing contact.
PeopleTools: Workflow Technology
Once you associate a support team with a contract, you can make contract-specific edits to the support team, adding or deleting team members as applicable to the given contract. You can associate multiple support teams to the contract header. For example, you might set up several support teams to reflect different contract cycles. You might have a sales support team consisting of the salesperson, sales support person, and so on. You might have an administration support team consisting of the contract administrator, the billing contact, the support contact, and so forth.
The support team for a contract can change during the lifetime of a contract. You can edit a support team at any time. Effective dating of the support team ensures that you always have a record of changes made to the support team. When making a change to a support team, the system reflects the change immediately in PeopleSoft Contracts.
Use email notification in PeopleSoft Workflow Technology to notify employees of a change to the status of a contract or to the status of one of the contract components. You can define separate email notifications for each status of a given component, or you can use a wildcard (%) in the status field to define email notification for a change to any status levels of a given component.
When configuring your PeopleSoft Contracts system, you optionally designated email notifications at the PeopleSoft Contracts business unit level and at the contract type level. When creating a contract, you can optionally enable email notification at the contract level. The system uses the following hierarchy to determine which established set of email notification parameters to use:
Contract number.
Contract type.
Contract business unit.
When you enable email notification for PeopleSoft Contracts, you can trigger email notes to all team members or just the team manager, or you can skip email altogether. Additionally, you can send email to anyone else not on the support team by adding a list of email addresses onto the Support Team by Contract page.
When creating email lists for PeopleSoft Contracts email notification, you can use support team functionality, enter individual email addresses onto the email notification pages, or use a combination of the two. Oracle recommends that you use support team functionality to more easily manage the contract support personnel across your organization. You can maintain a support team that you use across multiple contracts from a single location.
For example, let's say you define a support team code of WESTREGCONS to support your western region consulting practice. The support team code contains the practice manager, contract administrator, and finance manager. You create 100 contracts for this consulting practice. For each contract, at the contract level you enable email notification for the WESTREGCONS support team. If the contract administrator leaves and you hire a new contract administrator, you replace the old contract administrator with the new contract administrator in the WESTREGCONS support team code and the new contract administrator is immediately added to the email notification lists for the consulting practice's contracts. If you had manually added the old contract administrator to receive email notification for component status changes of each contract, you must manually update the email list on each of the 100 contracts.
Note: If you change the contract administrator in your support team code, the system does not automatically change the value in the contract administrator field on the contract component.