The Automatic Alignment Process

After you set up sales team members, territories, and industry groupings, you can then align the sales force. The alignment process happens automatically each time a customer record is added or changed. The system assigns sales team members to each customer record when the record is added or changed, based on the territory and industry grouping. After the sales team is assigned to a customer, the active members of that sales team are copied to opportunity records that are created for that customer. However, once a sales team has been added to an opportunity, the sales force alignment process does not change the opportunity's sales team. The alignment process affects only customer sales team records.

When sales team members are assigned to a customer, the system creates a record in the F42140 table.

The automatic alignment process consists of these steps:

1. You enter a new customer record, or change the industry, territory, or primary address of an existing customer record.

2. If the customer's existing sales team includes members who are no longer active in both the territory and the industry grouping, the system adds an expiration date to those members, which removes them from the active sales team.

3. If the customer's existing sales team includes members whose beginning effective date is greater than the system date, the system does not remove that member from the sales team or change the effective dates for that member.

4. The system retrieves the customer's primary address information to determine which territory to assign to the record.

5. The system identifies all sales team members who are active in the specified territory.

   A sales team member is considered active if their beginning effective date is on or before the system date, and their expiration date is on or after the system date.

6. The system retrieves the customer's industry grouping code.

7. The system identifies all sales team members who are active for the specified industry grouping.

   A sales team member is considered active if their beginning effective date is on or before the system date, and their expiration date is on or after the system date.

8. The system adds all of the sales team members who are active in both the specified territory and the specified industry grouping to the customer's sales team.

   The system assigns the system date as the begin date for all newly added members of the sales team.