Assignment Manager – An Overview

source from siebeloracle.com


Introduction of Assignment Manager :  Siebel Assignment Manager routes business entities and work items to the most appropriate candidates by enforcing business rules set by sales, service, and marketing organizations. Assignment Manager does this by matching candidates (that is, employees, positions, and organizations) to predefined and user-configurable assignment objects. To assign the most qualified candidate to each object, Assignment Manager applies assignment rules that you define to each candidate.
 Three major terms used in Assignment manager

1. Assignment Objects
2. Candidates
3. Criteria

Assignment Objects—the data that need to be assigned. Identify the types of data being assigned, such as accounts, opportunities, and service requests. An assignment rule may be used to assign one or more assignment objects
Candidates—the people, positions or organizations that will be assigned to that data. Assignment Manager assigns data to: Employee candidates, Position candidates, Organization candidates. An assignment rule may

• Contain a list of candidates who are assigned if the rule passes
• Match data to candidates based on their skills

Criteria—define which data will be assigned to which candidates. There can be multiple criteria per rule. Examples of criteria:

• Does the Position Type = Sales Person?
• Does the candidate have a skill with the product associated with this service request?

Below figure shows the entities in Siebel that are used in Assignment Rules

To define assignment rules, we need the following:

1. Objects to which each assignment rule applies
2. Rule groups to which each assignment rule belongs
3. Candidates.person (employee or position), organization, or both.for each assignment rule
4. Criteria for each assignment rule
5. (Optional) Values for assignment criteria 

For the Assignment rules we can also mention the below
Scores for each assignment rule, criteria, and value and a personal score for each individual candidate For example: In a sales organization, you can create an assignment rule that scores positions (candidates) based on territory definitions (criteria) for an opportunity (object).
We can also customize the way Assignment Manager makes assignments by:
1. Defining how attributes are matched by:

• Using different comparison methods
• Making criteria required (compulsory) or optional
• Using inclusion and exclusion methods
• Using workload distribution rules 

2. Defining how assignment rules are matched by using:

• Assignment rule groups
• Assignment rule sequencing 

3. Defining how candidates are assigned based on person and organization relationships using multitiered assignment.
4. Creating and configuring your own entities, including:

• Assignment objects
• Assignment criteria
• Assignment attributes
• Dynamic candidates and candidate teams that are assigned dynamically            depending on the object row assigned

5. Running Assignment Manager in different operating modes to process assignments:

• Interactively in real time
• Dynamically when object rows are created or attributes on object rows are changed by connected or mobile users for example as soon as a Service Request is created it gets assigned to a resource depending on the skills or workload etc.
• Periodically assigning objects in batches(Manually running the batch assignment to assign objects for example Accounts )

6. Checking availability before assigning employees to objects