e-Up new website is live

Dear,

I have abandoned this blog long time ago and for good.. I am sorry for the amount of readers that regularly checked this blog for some news.
The recent 5 years long financial crisis has impacted everyone and everything and so the publishers I was collaborating for to write my articles. Additionally, the attitude of corporations towards consultancy has changed, also due to the lack of quality of many providers, guilty of overpricing very bad quality services.
But they say during crisis the most innovative ideas take place. I hope this is the same in our case, as we dedicated time to hard work and research and started a company based in Dublin in 2012: e-Up Unified Perspective.
We just launched our new website and the new software at the same time.
e-Tools is the result of advanced research and consultancy, and its aim is supporting the implementation and above all the analysis of all existing Siebel applications that are still out there, despite the slow reduction of implementations due to the competition, above all versus Salesforce.com, as prefered CRM platform.
To be honest the first competitor of Siebel has been been its new owner: Oracle. It's their policy towards the one time first CRM platform in the world, that has actually killed it.
As I will attend next Oracle Open World and the Siebel 2014 IP will be presented, I am really curious about the way Oracle will promote its strategy.
Despite some employees still insist on the fact that Siebel is not dead and that new functionalities will be presented towards next years, the market seems to have less and less interest on this technology, even after the advent of Open UI.
Siebel implementations failed and continue to fail because the lack of best practices and tools that support this. Business analysis, for example, has never been supported or "educated" by Oracle, leaving it to the disorganization of Organizations. or to the trends of too heavy and too generic methodologies.
e-Tools will allow the modelling of visual artefacts for all the phases of a typical Siebel implementation, easing the adoption of best practices.
I refer to Siebel Tools as an old punch cards machine, with its old-fashioned parametrization approach, without mentioning the lack of support for anything else (requirements gathering, modelling, application design, etc.). Have a look at the first video about e-Tools and let me know if you realize the difference with the standard Siebel Tools:

Having worked with Cloud platforms such as Salesforce.com, I cannot be good with new available tools as well. On the contrary, while Siebel was a greatly engineered piece of software, recent trends tend to bring us back, rather than forward. I cannot think any longer about any valid packaged application in the market, simply because the tendency is that of returning to custom development, despite the fact you use an old programming language or a "cool" new one. Some technical solutions for corporations are simply embarrassing; customers have to be lighten from the burden of over-engineered and not useful technologies, but this does not mean solutions have to be technically crap.
If cloud is now so trendy, be sure you will soon find silos also in the sky, not only on your premises...

But I have probably taken too much time and too much space for the initial intention of this post, therefore I end simply simply inviting you to visit our new website www.e-up.pro.
We shall probably introduce a blog section on the website, therefore I might continue posting some articles there... stay tuned!

Siebel 8 Territory management

This morning a reader contacted me to ask me what exactly Territory Management is in Siebel and the difference, for example, with Assignment Manager. Unfortunately I could not answer immediately as I was on the phone with a prospect, so I am going to explain Territory Management in this post, for him and whoever might be interested. I am going to describe Territory Management as it is in the last Siebel version 8, because new features have been introduced and so I want this post to be useful also for the people that already know assignment manager rules in previuos Siebel versions.

In this first post I will limit the scope to the administration process flow and the setting up of the environment. If anyone was interested in seeing in detail some specific parts, just leave a comment and I will be glad to go deeper in that direction.

Well, first of all let me introduce some order: Territory Management is the set of Siebel functionalities to manage sales and service territories, while the assignment manager is the engine that, based on defined rules, assigns Sales Reps to account, contact or opportunity teams (in a SFA case) or assign ownership of assets to field service engineers (in a field services case).

Technically speaking, assignment manager is a Siebel Server component group dedicated to the execution of the assignment rules defined by assignment criteria.

The territory management functionality is mainly offered in order to avoid requiring developers for the modification or creation of workflow/batch assignments, while giving administrators a platform to create assignment rules (supposing that all the necessary fields to construct the filter are available).

This is quite clear if you observe the figure 1, the model 2 diagram representing a classic process flow: allmost all the activities are delegated to the Administrator. Unfortunately I had to split the image in two for dimensions reasons, but consider the second part as the continuation of the first (horizontal oriented swimlane).

Figure 1. Process Flow for territory management.

In relation to the configuration setup I am going to use, on the contrary, example diagrams belonging to the first model of the Crm-Up methodology (CRM Use Case Analysis). There are specific reasons behind this choice that are in any case out of this posts' scope and more related to the Crm-Up methodology. It's just to say that probably some UML purist could look with suspect our use case modeling approach, but this is part of the innovation in Crm-up methodology and our aim is usability and high adoption by all the stakeholders of a CRM implementation project, business users included.

Anyway, in the Figure 2 you can find a description of the first step in the configuration setup, that is the enablement of the component groups.

Figure 2. Setup - first step: enable component groups

In figure 3 you can find the third territory management setup step, that is the enablement of all the necessary Workflows.

Figure 3. Setup - second step: enable workflows

Last but not least, in figure 4 the third setup is represented, that is the load splitter configuration.

Figure 4. Setup - last step: load Splitter configuration

Well, that's pretty much all for this first post; as I said, if anyone is interested in the details of any of the described steps, feel free to contact me and I will be glad to describe them.

Think about it ;)