The first installment in BizTech's Oracle CRM On Demand Release 20 Readiness Series provides an overview of the Territory Management and Access Control enhancements.
The key areas of investment by Oracle Product Management in Release 20 for Territory Management are:
- New record ownership modes
- The ability to set a Primary book
- Effective dating for Account Books and Contact Books for Territory Realignments
- Import enhancements related to books
New record ownership modes - Many of our clients distribute record ownership based on territories rather than to specific individuals. This is especially time consuming when sales team turnover is frequent. To address this concern Release 20 of CRM On Demand introduces a flexible ownership model:
- User-Only mode - this is the behavior prior to Release 20 where the owner field is required to be populated for the record
- Book-Only mode - you enforce a record to be associated to a book
- Mixed-mode - where you give the flexibility of the record having an individual owner, or a book, or no one at all
Primary Book - Certain companies have their sales organizations setup such that each customer account has a primary sales team with the option of having sub-teams associated to it. This can be useful for an organization that uses this structure to calculate different commission percentages based on whether the individual is on the primary team, or the sub-team. Given this common scenario and others that require the concept of a primary team or sub-team Release 20 introduces the ability to set a book associated to a record as the primary book.
Effective dating for Account Books and Contact Books for Territory Realignments - In certain industries it is common to perform territory realignments such as distributing or redistributing accounts and contacts across one or more sales forces within the organization. A realignment may even involve assigning different sales people to existing territories or changing the accounts or contacts in the territory. To facilitate these transfers Release 20 introduces two new fields called start date and end date. These new fields now provide the ability to define “future books” or books that are not yet active but are set to be active at a future date. This will allow company admins to pre-load these “future books” without affecting the book model that is currently being used. By having the ability to set an end date to an account book or contact book, books can now expire after a certain date. And with the start date field, account books and contact books can be loaded early, but be made active by the system once the start date is reached.
Import enhancements related to books – Release 20 introduces import capabilities to support books and book relationships to allow updating of existing books and pre-loading of “future books” or “future book relationships”. Both the Import Wizard UI and the Bulk Data Loader will support Account Books, Books, Book Users, and Contact Books.
