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Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Territory Management- Defining Service Territory

Posted by at 4:05 AM Read our previous post

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.



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