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Overview
Organizations
that provide service and support to their customers and employees need an
effective and robust system to deliver this service and support. One of the
keys to a successful service and support delivery system is to be able to route
service requests and their tasks to the correct resource for quick and
efficient resolution.
Service
Requests can be routed based on many conditions like city, country, status,
type etc.
Having a robust routing solution has the
following benefits:
·
Faster
response times
·
Satisfy
Service Level Agreements
·
Increase
agent productivity
·
Reduce
cost of providing service
Ebusiness Suite’s Territory
Management
Territory
Manager is used in the assignment of business objects such as Service Requests
and Tasks to Resources based on configurable business rules. It defines who
owns what.
Territory Concepts and Terms
a. Territory Usage
Territory
Usage corresponds to the different Applications within the E-Business Suite of
Applications that use Territory Manager for ownership assignment to their
business objects. The following seeded usage codes are available
·
Collections
·
Partner Management
·
Service => assignment for Service Requests
and Tasks
·
Sales
·
Service Contracts
·
Trade Management
b. Territory Types
Territory Types are the building blocks for
all territories. A type is blueprint for territories, defined by a specific set
of transaction types and corresponding matching attributes. Territory Types
easies the process of territory creation. Every territory that is created is
created based on a Territory Type. The three components of a Territory Type
are:
·
Usage
·
Transaction
Type
·
Qualifiers
c. Transaction Types
Transaction Types refer to the different
business objects within each Application or Usage that depends on territories
to determine ownership of that business objects. In the case of Service Usage,
the seeded Transaction Types are the following:
·
Service
Request
·
Service
Request and Task => refers to a Service Request Task
·
Task
=> refers to a standalone Task – do not use this transaction type even
though it is available. Standalone Tasks are not used by Service.
d. Qualifiers or Matching Attributes
Qualifiers refer to the attributes of either
A business object being assigned OR An object associated to the business
object.
For
example, service request is a business object. The service request’s attributes
are the service request Qualifiers – for example a service Request’s attributes
can be its Status, Severity, Type, Address, etc. – these attributes are the
service request’s qualifiers.
Qualifiers
are categorized as geographic and non-geographic qualifiers. The following
qualifiers are the geographic qualifiers: City, Postal Code, State, Province,
County, and Country. The rest of the qualifiers are non-geographic.
e. Geographic Qualifiers
Geographic
qualifiers refer to address information like Country, State, City, Postal Code
etc. Geographic qualifiers are numeric like Postal Code or text strings like
Country, State, City etc. When using text strings, Oracle Territory Manager
does a text comparison between what is stored in territory tables and what is
passed from the Service application to determine matching territories. The text
string match is not case sensitive however they need to match exactly in the
way they are spelt.
f. Territory Hierarchy
Territories
are defined in a hierarchical structure – Parent – Child – Grand Child – and so
on. This is done for the ease of maintenance of territories. Hierarchies also
allow child territories to inherit matching rules and territory properties of
its parent territory.
g. Catch Alls
Catch All is a concept in Oracle Territory
Manager that Customers can use when designing their territory hierarchy. These
are territories that are defined at a significantly high level and are intended
to be the winning territory if all other territories are not identified as
winning territories. Usually territories directly under the root level
territory are good candidates to be setup as Catch-All territories.
When defining Catch Alls, use the following
tips:
·
Use
qualifiers that will most definitely return a matching territory
·
Use
resources that are default resources who can work on service requests or their
tasks in case no other resources are available. Most likely resources in a
Catch All are at a supervisor or administrator level who can reroute the
service request or its task to an appropriate resource
·
Name
the territory appropriately and append the phrase ‘Catch All’ for ease of
identification of Catch All in the territory hierarchy
h. Operating Unit
Each
territory is defined under an Operating Unit. A common example on the usage of
Operating Unit is to be able to define different geographic regions under
different Operating Units.
Defining a Simple Territory
Navigation
: Territory Management -> Territories -> Create
1.
Select the proper Territory type
2.
Fill up all the necessary information like the Territory Name, Rank, winners,
start and end date and then click on Next
3.
Next screen is to enter the resource information. Select the resources who will
be assigned as the owner of the service request if this particular territory
wins. The Resource type can be either Individual, Group or a Team.
4.
Select the Geographic Qualifiers. Geographic qualifiers help break down a
territory with respect to a location or an area on a map. Defining geographic
qualifiers and their values is an optional component of a territory and can be
skipped.
5.
Now in the next page add the matching Criteria for the territory. For Example
we can select service request type a criteria and in the below section list
down the service requests that are part of the territory.
6.
After clicking on finish our territory is defined now.
7.
After creating the territory we have to run the STAR concurrent Program . The Synchronize
Territory Assignment Rules concurrent program optimizes
territory rules. Each time a territory structure is newly added or an existing
structure changed, the STAR concurrent program needs to be executed to optimize
the addition or modification to the structure.
Territory Retrieval Process
The
goal of the retrieval process is to identify the winning territory. Depending
on the value of the ‘Number of Winners’, more than one territory can be
identified as a winning territory.
The retrieval process consists of the
following:
1. Locate matching Territory(s)
2. Sort matching Territory(s) by Rank
3. Pick winning Territory(s)
4. Return winning Territory(s) and
Resource(s)
1. Locate Matching Territory(s)
To understand how territories are identified
as matching territories it is important to understand how rules are defined
within a territory and how these rules are evaluated. The rules in a territory
have a similar structure as a database expression – each rule has a Left hand
side, an Operator, and a Right hand side. For example:
Service Request Type Equals
Customer Call
Left hand side Operator Right hand side
The Left hand side of the expression
or a territory rule is made up of the name of the qualifier.
The Operators that are supported are
the following: Is Equal To, Contains, and Between. Most qualifiers can only use
the ‘Is Equal To’ operator; however there are some qualifiers like the Postal
Code, Area Code, and Customer Name Range that can make use of all three operators.
The
Right hand side of the expression is the value of the qualifier that is
either picked from a pre-defined List of Values (LOV) or can be user entered
free form text. In the majority of qualifiers, the value is picked from a LOV
to increase the level of accuracy.
In
the above example, service requests created with type ‘Customer Call’ results
in the above expression evaluating to true – hence resources within this
territory will be considered for assignment. Territories whose expressions
evaluate to True are known as matching territories.
In
cases where more then one qualifiers are used or a parent and child territory
structure exits, Territory Manager uses the following rules when using the ‘OR’
and ‘AND’ conditional operators:
·
Territory Manager uses the ‘AND’ operator
when joining expressions between Parent and Children Territories
·
If a single Territory contains the same
Qualifier more than once, Territory Manager joins the expressions using the
‘OR’ conditional operator.
·
If a single Territory contains different
Qualifiers, Territory Manager joins the expressions using the ‘AND’ conditional
operator.
b. Sort Matching Territories by Rank
When defining territories, each territory has
a rank. The use of the rank attribute is to sort the list of territories when
there is more than one matching territory. Territories with lower rank values
precede those with higher rank values. Number
of Winners determines how many territories can be winning territories. For
example, if there are five matching territories, and the Number of Winners is
set to a value of three, only three territories out of the potential five are
considered winning territories. The three territories out of the potential five
are selected based on the rank comparison of each territory.
c. Pick Winning Territories
Once the Absolute Ranks are derived, the
winning territories can be easily identified. Depending on the value for Number
of Winners, different territories are returned as winning territories.
d. Returning Winning Territory and Resource.
Once
the winning territory(s) is picked, the resource assigned to the territory is
assigned as an owner for that Service Request. In case of multiple territories
as winners, the system assigns the owner randomly from any of the winning
territory.
You may also like to read Data Quality Management (DQM) in Oracle TCA
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