Overview of Assignment Processing Components

You can use assignment processes to assign resources (for example, salespeople or territory owners) to the business objects they work on, such as an opportunity or a lead. Once assigned, resources and territory owners, along with their managers, have visibility into the business object.

Candidate and Work Objects

When setting up assignment, you should be familiar with two types of assignment objects: candidate objects and work objects:

Work objects are the business objects that get assigned, for example, accounts, opportunities, leads, partners, and deals.
Candidate objects are the possible pool of assignment candidates, for example resources or territories.

Territory-Based Assignment

After you set up your territories, territory-based assignment matches territory dimensions and attributes to work objects. You can set up territory-based assignment to be completely automated, to happen on-demand, or you can use a combination of these settings. Territory-based assignment requires that you set up your territories and resource hierarchy, set profile options to configure assignment, and run assignment processes.

For an introduction to setting up territory-based assignment, start with the topic, Overview of Sales Territory and Assignment Setup.

Rule-Based Assignment

Rule-based assignment lets you set up additional rules used to assign resources to work objects. Rule-based assignment lets you capture attributes not defined in territory-based assignment. Once you set up the rules containing conditions that records must meet, then resources get assigned to the object when they match the rule conditions.

For example, you can use rules to:

Assign a certain salesperson to the sales team when the customer is located in specific state or region.
Assign the accelerated leads expert to leads whose time frame is less than three months.
Calculate lead rank based on lead score.

Rule-based assignment requires that you plan your rules, create the rules using the rules UI, and set profile options to configure assignment, in addition to any scheduled processes that must be run.

Assignment Profile Options

Each of the business objects available in assignment has its own set of profile options that allow you to further configure assignment.

Scheduled Processes

Scheduled processes are batch jobs that capture data and allow business objects to act on that data. You must schedule several processes when using assignment.

Assignment Reports

You can use the Diagnostic Dashboard to generate reports about assigned objects and the volume of territory data involved in assignment.