CRM: Rule-based assignment of Employees

Arno-Meyer · ‎02-25-2010

From a Sales-perspective it is very important to get names and addresses of new potential customers and to store this information in the system. However without the assignment of an "Owner" almost nothing will happen with this potential customer. Therefore the assignment of the Employee Responsible is an important initial step to turn a potential customer into an effective customer.

In general the recommendation to do the right assignment of Employees to Accounts is Territory Management. There are already several Blog about Territory Management available here in this community. You can find some links as appendix of this blog.

Today I want to highlight another option to assign Employees to Accounts.
This solution is called "Rule-based assignment of Employees".
With "Rule-based assignment of employees" you can assign employees to accounts and contacts with different relationship types (e.g. has employee responsible) and sales-area-dependent partner functions.
The logic of this assignment is defined in Rule Policies, which can be created and maintained with the Rule Modeler. The Rule Modeler as such is a generic feature (known as ERMS= E-Mail Response Management System) and Rule Policies are defined in different "contexts". Rule Policies which are used for rule based assignment of employees have to be defined in the context "Account and Contact Management". Within a "Context" different Rule Policies can be created for the rule based Assignment of Employees.
The rule-based assignment can be triggered manually by the user within the account- and contact overview page, or via a scheduled batch program.
Definition of Rules
Very similar to Territory Management a Rule contains a block for conditions which are combined with a logical "AND" or "OR".
The next Block contains "Actions". The whole rule is a statement like this:

If 
Country Equals USA and 
City Contains "Los Angeles"
Then 
Assign Relationship by Employee ID 
( Relationship Type = Is the Employee Responsible For; 
Assign Business Partner ID = D0815; 
Is Standard for this Relationship = Yes; 
Execution Behaviour = Continue (even if partner(s) found) )

The 'If-Part' contains the conditions - the 'Than-Part' contains the actions.
Usually one Rule-Policy consists of multiple Rules.

Assignment in Batch-Mode

For rule based assignment of Employees a Batch Report can be used.

For the Batch Report (Report-Name: CRM_BUPA_ASSIGN_EMPLOYEE) different Attributes like the Business Partner Number, the Business Partner Type, the Change Date, the Business Partner Role, etc. can be chosen.

Within this Report any Rule Policy of the context "Account and Contact Management" can be selected.

The User can run the report directly or use a variant of the report to schedule the report for a specific interval. This also allows the regular (re)Assignment of Employees for all new created or changed Accounts.

Manual Assignment

Within the Header-Toolbar of the Account- and Contact Overview Pages there is a Button called "Employee Assignment".

If the user presses this button a specific Rule Policy will run and assign the Employee as defined in the Rule if the attributes of the Account matches with the conditions of the rules.

Monitoring of Assignment Process

It’s possible to analyze the action-log of the Assignment Process.

This can be done with transaction "slg1".

The object to select is "CRM_BP_***".

As a result all message texts for the selected user and time-frame will be displayed.