Wednesday, May 11, 2016

Siebel Application Usage Pattern Tracking

Siebel CRM Innovation Pack 2015 onwards, Application usage tracking becomes very easy as it is available OOTB and administrators can setup this in the application to get the details like "who", "when" and "how many times" access any UI/feature in the Siebel application. The best part is, it is so much configurable that administrator can decide what all events need to be captured and analyzed.

This video would be very helpful for Siebel administrator to know how to setup the tracking for Siebel Application Usage and use it for analysis.






Monday, May 9, 2016

Auto Fix the Product structure in Quote/Order Line Items

There are situations when due to some business requirements you make changes in the existing Products/Promotions (configured in Administration – Products screen), may be you add a simple product at the second level hierarchy with a minimal cardinality as 1 or add some attribute with some pre-default value and so on.
So, in these kind of situations, while you are working on Asset based ordering (ABO) processes, on the existing Assets (which are based on such Promotions/Products where structure got changed), system doesn’t bring newly added product (in the hierarchy with min cardinality as 1) in the Quote/Order line item automatically, unless you open the Product Configurator window manually by clicking Customize button and then you will see a warning message there. Then you click on Accept button and after that click on Done button so that system fixes the Line items structure for you.
(Please note that we are just talking about fixing the “Default” structure of the complex product here)
So, bottom line is you have to open Product Configurator window to get it fixed. But what about the scenarios where ABO operations are performed by third party systems with the help of some web-services and no manual intervention would be there. How to get the Promotion/Product structure fixed in such situations?
And the answer is you can make use of headless configuration and achieve this using  RCOIS  business service: Remote Complex Object Instance Service (RCOIS)
So, here below are the steps that you can call as part of a sub-process:
(Let’s assume we are working on some Quote, and the quote line items structure would be fixed)




·        Load EAI
BS Name         :           ISS Copy Service
BS Method     :           LoadEAI
Input Arguments
Input Argument
Type
Value/Property Name
IntegrationObjectName
Literal
7.7 Quote Integration Object
(IO to query Quote)
ParentObjectId
Process Property
ActiveDocumentId
(Row Id of the Quote)
RootId
Process Property
RootId
(RowId of the Root quote line item)
SearchSpec
Expression
"[Header.Id] = '" + [&ActiveDocumentId] + "' AND [Line Item.Root Id] = '" + [&RootId] + "'"
Output Arguments
Property Name
Type
Output Argument/Value




·        Load Instance
BS Name         :           Remote Complex Object Instance Service
BS Method     :           LoadInstance
Input Arguments
Input Argument
Type
Value/Property Name
IntObjName
Literal
7.7 Quote Integration Object
ObjId
Process Property
ActiveDocumentId
RootId
Process Property
RootId
ExternalScript
Literal
Y
Output Arguments
Property Name
Type
Output Argument/Value




·        Get Instance
BS Name         :           Remote Complex Object Instance Service
BS Method     :           GetInstance
Input Arguments
Input Argument
Type
Value/Property Name
IntObjName
Literal
7.7 Quote Integration Object
ObjId
Process Property
ActiveDocumentId
RootId
Process Property
RootId
Output Arguments
Property Name
Type
Output Argument/Value




·        Sync Instance
BS Name         :           Remote Complex Object Instance Service
BS Method     :           SyncInstance
Input Arguments
Input Argument
Type
Value/Property Name
IntObjName
Literal
7.7 Quote Integration Object
ObjId
Process Property
ActiveDocumentId
RootId
Process Property
RootId
TriggerEvent
Literal
Y
Output Arguments
Property Name
Type
Output Argument/Value




·        Unload Instance
BS Name         :           Remote Complex Object Instance Service
BS Method     :           UnloadInstance
Input Arguments
Input Argument
Type
Value/Property Name
IntObjName
Literal
7.7 Quote Integration Object
ObjId
Process Property
ActiveDocumentId
RootId
Process Property
RootId
Output Arguments
Property Name
Type
Output Argument/Value




So, these small set of steps will help in achieving the same end result that you would achieve by manually clicking the “Customize” button on the UI, then “accept” the warning displayed in the Product Configurator window and then click “Done” button.


Tuesday, May 3, 2016

Siebel CRM Innovation Pack 2016 is here!!!

Good News!!
Siebel CRM Innovation Pack 2016 is released with lot many new functionalities and highlights.

Enjoy this youtube video to get a glimpse of it.




Can also go through the Doc Id 2121894.1 on the supportweb for more details.
  
Cheers
Gaurav


Friday, February 19, 2016

Multi Org support for an Inbound Web Service

Let’s talk about a scenario today.

We have different end-users from India, USA etc logged into the web-portal for placing their orders and from the web portal they can register themselves. We have a “Create Account” Inbound Web Service which is used to create Accounts in Siebel. Whenever a new customer register himself, the web portal sends the information to AIA and then AIA invokes the Siebel’s “Create Account” WS.

The requirement is, if end-user belongs to India then the new Account created in Siebel, should be visible to Siebel users who belongs to “India” organization. If the end-user belongs to USA then the new Account created in Siebel, should be visible to Siebel users who belong to “USA” organization.

(Note: Web Portal is able to identify the Customer and able to send the Organization name to AIA and then AIA will send the Organization tag in inbound XML to Siebel)
<Organization>USA</Organization>
                                    OR
<Organization>India</Organization>

Solution:
Actually there are multiple ways to do it and with the help of Access Control mechanism which Siebel provides OOTB, this can be easily achievable.

Possible Solution 1:
Let’s take an example, there are two users. First one is assigned with the Position let’s say “Position India” and its corresponding Organization is set as “India”.
Second user is assigned with the Position let’s say “Position USA” and its corresponding Organization is set as “USA”.

Now, we all know that, as part of the OOTB solution, all the Account records created by first user on the UI will be visible in “All Contacts” view to all the application users who belong to “India”. Similarly, all the Account records created by second user will be visible in “All Contacts” view to all the application users who belong to “USA”.

The same concept can be used while invoking the Inbound WS. In Siebel, we can create two EAI user Profiles, one belongs to “India” and other one belongs to “USA” and pass-on the user credentials to the source system (AIA). While invoking the inbound WS, source system can use the appropriate login credentials according to the Organization name.

Possible Solution 2:
Siebel application user can hold multiple positions. If you are working in Siebel UI, you can navigate to Tools -> User Preferences -> Change Position view to change the position of the logged-in user. The moment you change the position, the new records that are created after that will hold the visibility according to the position’s organization.

Similarly, the same can be achieved while invoking the inbound WS. Assuming the EAI User profile, that is being used to invoke the inbound WS, will hold multiple positions let’s say 1) “Position India” and 2) “Position USA”.

Create a step in the workflow do the “Change Position”. I am not sure if there is any vanilla BS available to simulate the “Change Position” step that we can perform from UI, so here is the small script would do the task. Assuming “Organization” name is the input argument to the business service method:

function ChangePosition(Inputs, Outputs)
{
var sOrganization = Inputs.GetProperty("Organization");
 var oBO = TheApplication().GetBusObject("Change Position");
 var oBC = oBO.GetBusComp("Change Position");
 with(oBC)
 {
  ClearToQuery();
  ActivateField("Organization");
  SetViewMode(AllView);
  ExecuteQuery();
  var isRecord = FirstRecord();
  while(isRecord)
  {
   if(GetFieldValue("Organization") == sOrganization)
   {
    InvokeMethod("Change Position");
    break;
   }
   isRecord = NextRecord();
  }
 }
 oBC = null;
 oBO = null;
}

After this “Change Position” rest of the workflow execution would continue.



Wednesday, February 17, 2016

How to perform "Apply Promotion" on Order?

If you are an expert in Siebel Order Management area, you would know that the OOTB workflow "ISS Promotion WS - ApplyProductPromotion" comes very handy for the scenario where we want to apply a Promotion on an existing Quote. Meaning this workflow accepts two input process properties, and System will gives you a complete quote hierarchy with the whole Promotion structure expanded in the Quote line items.

1) ProdPromId        : RowId of the Promotion record
2) SiebelMessage   : Quote hierarchy of IO: PDS Quote

But, there is no OOTB way available to perform the same operation on Order (in one step) as we can do over Quote.

Here below are the simple steps you can include in a wrapper workflow to make this happen. The best part is this complete solution uses OOTB workflows only.

·        Create a dummy Quote in a workflow Siebel Operation step. Get the RowId of the new Quote.

Output : QuoteId

·        Create SiebelMessage of Quote using EAI Siebel Adapter.

Input:
PrimaryRowId
Process Property
QuoteId
OutputIntObjectName
Literal
PDS Quote
                                               
Output:
SiebelMessage
Output Argument
SiebelMessage

·        Invoke WF: "ISS Promotion WS – ApplyProductPromotion", by passing the RowId of Promotion record and SiebelMessage.

Input:
ProdPromId
Process Property
<Promotion Row Id>
SiebelMessage
Process Property
SiebelMessage

Output:
SiebelMessage
Output Argument
SiebelMessage

·        Invoke WF: "SIS OM Quote To Order Workflow PMT Version". This will just convert the Quote into Order.

Input:
Object Id
Process Property
QuoteId

Output:
OrderId
Output Argument
OrderHeaderId


·        Invoke WF: "SISOMBillingSubmitOrderWebService", to submit the Order to downstream system.

Input:
Fulfillment Mode
Literal
Deliver
Object Id
Process Property
OrderId
Order Number
Process Property
<Order Number>
Order Revision Number
Process Property
<Revision Number>
PageSize
Literal
1