About Initiative Eligibility Criteria

Each initiative can define its target market by specifying the criteria that must be satisfied before a customer is invited to participate in a program. It can also confirm that the customer is still eligible to participate in a program at sign up or enrollment time. An initiative may have zero, one, or many eligibility criteria. Each customer is subjected to these criteria to determine whether they will have a lead generated for them for the initiative and/or whether they are still eligible to sign up or enroll into a program.

Designing these criteria can be easy or time-consuming; it all depends on the complexity of your business rules. The base product provides a number of initiative eligibility criteria types. Most of them perform comparisons based on a specific field; for example, one of the criteria types checks whether an account has submitted a rebate claim for a specific conservation program. Some types of eligibility criteria could simply check whether or not a specific condition is true. For instance, a base-supplied eligibility criteria business object checks that there is no active credit and collection process for the account.

Other types of eligibility criteria perform comparisons with scalar values (such as, a number of days, number of kwh) or with derived values (such as, attributes of an account). The base product provides a Freeform Criteria business object that can be used for these purposes. This business object provides flexibility in that the value to supply in the comparison field is driven by a Derive Value Algorithm Type. A number of these algorithm types are delivered with this business object. Your implementations can add to these algorithm types as needed.

Your implementation can decide to use specific criteria business objects (base-supplied and/or implementation-specific), extend the base-supplied Freeform Criteria business object, or a mixture of both. Refer to Designing Initiative Eligibility Criteria for more details.

To set up an eligibility criterion, you must define the following:

  • When the eligibility criterion should be executed - also called criteria execution point

  • The field to be compared

  • The comparison method

For the criteria execution point, the options include:

  • Prior to a lead being generated for a customer

  • Prior to the customer being signed up or enrolled into a program

  • Both of the above

For the field to be compared, you can execute an algorithm to:
  • Retrieve a field value or values from someplace else in the system (such as, the customer class or types of services associated with the customer)
  • Derive a value based on some data from someplace else in the system (such as, the number of days since the last lead was created for the customer)
For the comparison method, you select the operator to perform the comparison on the field to be compared. The result from the algorithm will be TRUE, FALSE, or INSUFFICIENT DATA. Each of these results should specify the next action. The valid actions include:

  • Indicate that the customer is eligible

  • Indicate that the customer is not eligible

  • Check the next condition

  • Issue an error (this option is only available for Insufficient Data )

Refer to Defining Eligibility Criteria for an Initiative for more information about setting up eligibility criteria on an initiative.