Understanding Persons

A person in PeopleSoft CRM is created in two ways: either by data entry within a CRM component or by integration with a human resources (HR) system. To avoid unnecessary data redundancy and to maintain data integrity, person data often originates in the HR system and is imported into CRM using enterprise integration points (EIPs) to automatically synchronize data updates between systems. These EIPs are available for person data: CUSTOMER_CONSUMER, CUSTOMER_CONTACT, and WORKER.

A person in CRM has one or more of these roles: contact, consumer, worker, or person of interest. Persons with these roles are represented as business objects of the Individual type. CRM stores these business objects in the Person table (RD_PERSON).

Common information is stored for the person and additional information is stored for each specific role that the person has. You can configure the role-specific pages that appear when you initially access the Person component. The contact role pages appear by default. You can add or edit information for other roles that apply to the same person by clicking the appropriate link on the Summary page of the Person component. For example, the Edit Worker Information link enables you to edit information that pertains to the person in the Worker role.

Much of the information that appears in the Person component for consumers and contacts is similar. Both consumers and contacts perform the same activities: purchasing, leasing, or contracting for products or services. The difference is that consumers are customers and act on their own behalf, whereas contacts act on behalf of a customer or customer site.

In CRM, consumers are represented as person business objects with a business object type of Individual and a role type of Individual Consumer. Consumer records are maintained in the Person table. Because consumers participate in business transactions, a record for each consumer is also created in the Business Contact (BC) table, which enables you to define records for sold-to, bill-to, and ship-to information for the consumer.

Contacts are represented as business objects with a business object type of Individual and a role type of Contact. When a person is added to the system as a contact, a record for the person is inserted in the Person table. When the person is associated with a company, consumer, or site, a record is inserted in the Business Object Relationship (BO_REL) table to capture the relationship between the person and the company, consumer, or site. In addition to maintaining contact information for the Contact role, you can also maintain a separate set of contact information for a particular relationship for a contact (such as postal and email addresses and telephone and pager numbers) for each company, consumer, and site relationship. This information is used to contact the person when you are performing the contact role for a specific customer or site.

A worker is any person who performs work for your organization, including employees and contractors. Worker information is used by the Support, HelpDesk, and Field Service applications and includes job detail and information that is used to manage worker assignment on service orders.

A person of interest (POI) does not fit into either the contact, consumer, or worker categories, but is someone for whom your organization needs to maintain data and provide services. Some examples of POIs are pension payees, board members, pre-hires, and retirees.

POIs are defined using a subset of pages in the Person component (contact and consumer-specific pages are not used for POIs). The only required information for a POI is first and last names. Optionally, you can enter contact information, POI type, as well as user profiles for POIs. POIs might also have job information if they are synchronized to CRM from HCM. If a POI is made available in CRM through an integration with HCM and it contains a job record, this data is stored in CRM in read-only mode. If a POI is created online in CRM, a job record cannot be created. Job information is not used for processing transactions within CRM, but, if available, it appears on HRHD 360 Degree View.

POIs contact HR service centers with questions about their or their spouses’ benefits, retirement plans, ESPPs and so on. In order for call center agents to capture reported issues quickly in cases when POIs call for the first time, CRM supports the creation of POIs through quick create at two primary entry points where cases get created: HRHD 360 Degree View search page and the employee search in HRHD cases.

Like other quick create enabled business objects, users with access to the Quick Create component can create POIs from there as well.