Module Overview:
The purpose of this module is to introduce participants to Siebel including: Product Suites, Core Modules, Extended Modules, and Vertical Suites.
At the end of this module, you will be able to:
Explain what Siebel is
Explain Siebel's core modules
Describe the type of Siebel Applications
Describe the types of User Interfaces
Discuss the Siebel Client and it's major features
The Siebel Enterprise framework consists of a suite of products that support the following areas: Sales, Service, Field Service, Call Center, and Marketing.
Siebel Product Suite:
Siebel Sales: This application allows teams of sales and marketing professionals to manage sales information throughout the entire sales cycle.
Siebel Service: This application uses closed-loop, service request, management capabilities.
Siebel Call Center: This application has a Universal Agent configuration that enables users to provide sales, marketing, and customer service assistance to customers including inbound/outbound sales and inbound customer service. It accesses Siebel Sales and Service to integrate all available customer information. This information allows additional sales opportunities, and provides integrated sales and service histories for each opportunity.
Siebel Field Service: This is a combination of Siebel Service Enterprise and Siebel Call Center. It offers complete field service functionality for call center agents and mobile field service engineers. Siebel Field Service builds on Siebel Service to handle field service scenarios and spare parts inventory and order management.
Siebel Marketing: This application enables marketing professionals, sales and service managers, and business analysts to monitor overall company performance and the effectiveness of company programs and activities. It extracts information from Siebel Sales, Service, and Call Center. The information is compiled into a customer data mart designed for fast data analysis.
Starting out at the bottom, Siebel is built on one common architecture. This common architecture means customers have one place in which to make configuration changes, minimizing integration cost and difficulty. On top of this common architecture, we build horizontal applications for Costumers, Call Centers, Field Agents, and Channel Parents. We will be going into more detail about horizontals and verticals in the Siebel Enterprise Framework slide.
Siebel’s product suite consists of a set of core modules otherwise known as Business Entities. A business entity is something in the real world in which we have a business interest. Siebel software is purchased in a modular format starting with a base set of modules. For example, Siebel Sales base modules are Accounts, Contacts, Activities and Opportunities.
Some of Siebel’s Business Entities include:
Accounts. Accounts allow sales and customer service reps and teams to track customers or potential customers.Account is a business external to your company, it represents a current or potential client, a business partner, or a competitor.
Contacts. Contacts allow users to manage both business and personal contacts. Contact is a person with whom you do business and has the following characteristics: Name, Job Title, Email Address.
Activities. Activities track tasks and events that are performed for a contact, account, or an opportunity. Activity is a specific task or event to be completed and has the following characteristics: Start date and due date, Priority, Assigned to specific employees for completion.
Opportunities. Opportunities allow sales reps and teams to track potential sales or other revenue-generating events. Opportunity is a potential revenue generating event with the following characteristics: Possible association with an account, Potential revenue, Probability of completion Close date.
Service Requests. Service Requests allow service reps to create and access information on a customer’s request. Service Request is a request from a customer for information or assistance with a problem related to products or services purchased from your company, it has the following characteristics: Status, Severity, Priority.
Assets. Assets are an instance of a purchased product and have the following characteristics: Asset Number, Product and Part Number, Status.
Applications are integrated, so they can work separately or together. Integrated applications access a common Siebel database. All Siebel eBusiness Applications are built on a common architecture.
Customer Applications are Web applications serving customers. These products provide ecommerce and self-service functionality as well as online marketing information. Siebel Customer Applications are comprised of Siebel eSales, eService, and eCustomer.
Siebel Employee Applications are those applications that are usually used by internal employees of an enterprise. Siebel Employee Applications are Web-based applications that serve the needs of all eBusiness employees in a small to mid-sized company. Siebel Employee Applications are comprised of Siebel Sales, Siebel Service and Siebel Call Center. Siebel Handheld, Siebel Wireless, and Siebel Voice all are included in the product called Siebel Mobile Solutions.
Siebel Partner Applications is the closed-loop application serving the needs of partner organizations, extending the influence and effectiveness of the core organization.
The Siebel eBusiness architecture includes a core set of object definitions or modules that are grouped into different layers depending on the object's function and characteristics. Enhancements to the Siebel eBusiness Architecture allows the simultaneous release of languages and platforms, the shipment of tier-one Languages for American English, German, European French, Modern Spanish and Japanese on the same day, and support for the Siebel Application Server on NT, Solaris and AIX, as well as support for DB2/UDB, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server
A unique Web architecture makes it possible to deliver highly interactive Web applications. Siebel eBusiness Applications 2001 combines the Siebel Application functionality with a browser-based user interface.
On top of the horizontal applications, we build vertical versions to meet the specific needs of vertical industries. Our vertical applications are full featured out-of-the-box applications designed to meet the needs of a vertical market.
Siebel Industry Applications deliver a comprehensive, prebuilt eBusiness functionality that is uniquely tailored to the specific business practices of a broad range of industries including: Financial Services, Healthcare, Communications, Energy, Consumer Sector, Life Sciences and Automotive.
Siebel Vertical products were developed to better meet the needs of targeted industries by having products that are industry-specific straight out of the box. The Verticals allow organizations to minimize customization costs and speed up product implementation.
Siebel refer to some of their products as horizontals. Horizontals are products that are not configured for a specific industry.
Siebel Verticals:
Siebel Communications: Developed for the telecommunications industry from the Siebel Sales Enterprise, this vertical supports the sales requirements for the wireline, wireless, and internet marketplace.
Siebel Consumer Goods: Based on the Siebel Sales Enterprise, it contains expanded account and trade promotion capabilities to allow processes unique to the consumer packaged goods industry. The vertical supports multi-tiered account management to include third party distributors and complex trade promotions.
Siebel Finance: Based on the Siebel Sales Enterprise, Siebel Finance supports multi-product, multi-channel solutions to wholesale, small business, and retail groups within the financial services organizations.
Siebel High Tech: Based on the Siebel Sales Enterprise, this vertical provides a closed-loop sales, marketing, and customer service solution geared to the high tech industry.
Siebel Insurance: Based on the Siebel Sales Enterprise, provides comprehensive policy and claims management functionality for the property and casualty insurance lines of business.
Siebel Pharma: Developed for both Sales and Marketing Enterprise applications. It provides the pharmaceutical professionals with industry specific functionality that supports sales to both individual providers and hospital/group providers.
Siebel Public Sector: A call center and customer service solution that enables national and local government agencies to be more responsive to customer needs.
Siebel Utilities: Based on the Siebel Service Enterprise, it provides updated detailed customer profiles, tracks customer problems, and can automatically assign problems to the agent best qualified to deal with the problem.
Siebel Horizontals:
Siebel Sales: This application allows teams of sales and marketing professionals to manage sales information throughout the entire sales cycle.
Siebel Service: This application uses closed-loop, service request, management capabilities.
Siebel Call Center: This application has a Universal Agent configuration that enables users to provide sales, marketing, and customer service assistance to customers including inbound/outbound sales and inbound customer service. It accesses Siebel Sales and Service to integrate all available customer information. This information allows additional sales opportunities, and provides integrated sales and service histories for each opportunity.
Siebel Field Service: This is a combination of Siebel Service Enterprise and Siebel Call Center. It offers complete field service functionality for call center agents and mobile field service engineers. Siebel Field Service builds on Siebel Service to handle field service scenarios and spare parts inventory and order management.
Siebel Marketing: This application enables marketing professionals, sales and service managers, and business analysts to monitor overall company performance and the effectiveness of company programs and activities. It extracts information from Siebel Sales, Service, and Call Center. The information is compiled into a customer data mart designed for fast data analysis.
Siebel's Industry Applications are out-of-the-box applications tailored to meet the needs of a vertical industry. These applications are built using the horizontal applications as the base, taking advantage of the rich Siebel architecture. Organizations using these vertical applications can get eBusiness applications into production more quickly. The work to configure the application to the specific vertical industry has already been done. This results in a faster return on investment. Each Industry Application takes advantage of Siebel EAI to enable seamless integration with industry-specific back-office systems. Siebel EAI is a development environment as well as a framework for building integration between Siebel Applications and external applications and technologies. You can use Siebel EAI to build integration between Siebel Applications and any other application in your environment.
Siebel Industry Applications 2001 offers significant new online interactive selling functionality, providing personalized applications for sales, marketing, customer service, and channel management over the Web.
In order to expand the functionality of the core products, Siebel Systems has introduced a suite of optional add-on modules. They significantly expand the capability of Siebel Enterprise applications. Some of these modules are:
Siebel Encyclopedia which provides sales and service professionals with access to all company marketing information, including product information.
Siebel Office which automates the process of sending correspondence, letters, surveys, etc.
Siebel Calendar which allows Siebel users to better maintain their schedules. It seamlessly integrates with the Siebel Activity Management System.
Siebel Telebusiness which enables lead generation and lead qualification for telesales professionals.
Siebel Remote which enables remote users to actively share information with corporate databases.
Siebel Reports which enables robust report generation for Siebel users. Reporting tools could be Microsoft Access, Actuate, or Crystal Reporting.
Siebel Executive Information System which allows executives to quickly visualize rolled up information in a variety of graphical formats.
Siebel Anywhere which allows seamless software and database upgrades for mobile users.
Siebel Workflow Manager which allows business managers to automate business policies and processes.
Siebel Interactive which integrates Siebel data with corporate intranets. Also allows access to information created by third party software agents.
Siebel Advanced Search This module enables users to quickly search for and access information from corporate knowledge repositories. It uses technologies such as term proximity, word stemming, term inflection, and fuzzy searching.
Siebel Quotes allows sales professionals to develop, verify, submit, and revise quotes tailored to customer requirements.
Siebel Revenue Forecasting allows sales representatives to estimate and submit forecasts based on opportunity revenues over time.
Siebel Product Forecasting allows sales representatives to estimate and submit forecasts based on unit volume and price estimates over time.
Siebel Customer Service Integration enables sales and marketing professionals to view all customer service requests and associated activities for their accounts.
Siebel Target Account Selling provides full support for the Target Account Selling methodology.
Siebel Presentation Generator. This module allows users to create Microsoft PowerPoint presentations.
Siebel Internet Self-Service. This module provides customers with a web and e-mail interface to service requests.
Siebel Quality Management. This module provides customer service reps with comprehensive defect tracking capabilities.
Siebel Field Service provides field service technicians and engineers with all the information to manage repairs and maintenance of products sold.
Siebel Product Configurator allows sales representatives to interactively configure solutions for building and ordering products.
Siebel Customer Analysis Contains pre-configured analysis tools focused on customer profile information.
Siebel Sales Analysis Contains pre-configured analysis tools focused on sales performance, sales pipeline, and competitor information.
Siebel Service Analysis Contains pre-configured analysis tools focused on customer service and customer satisfaction information.
Siebel Call Center Analysis Contains pre-configured analysis tools focused on campaign management and call center metric information.
Siebel Briefings Provides on-line briefing reports gathered from external sources such as web links that explain key business trends and drivers.
Siebel Data Mart Builder Provides a set of design and execution tools to populate a data mart.
Siebel OLAP (Online Analitical Processing) Server Provides the vehicle for high performance online analytical processing for large quantities of corporate data.
You must keep in mind that these are all additional modules that are purchased separately to complement Siebel’s core modules.
Traditional Web applications follow a model whereby almost every user action results in a page refresh. Some of the user actions that can trigger a page refresh are: a user changing the quantity of an item in the Shopping Cart, a user inserting a new appointment in the calendar, and a user selecting a different item from a list to see its details.
These frequent page refreshes not only slow down users by forcing them to wait for new pages, but also waste time as users reorient themselves with the frequently changing context caused by these page refreshes. In addition, frequent page refreshes are expensive in terms of network bandwidth utilization, as each page refresh requires the same HTML information, already displayed in the browser, to be downloaded with new data.
These limitations of traditional Web technology make it unsuitable for world-class enterprise applications such as call center and sales force automation.
The Siebel high interactivity framework solves the problem of lowered employee productivity and high bandwidth requirements by reducing the number of page refreshes.
The high interactivity framework depends on capabilities that are only available in later version browsers (for example, Internet Explorer 5.0 or 5.5), and is only used for employee applications such as Siebel Sales and Siebel Call Center. Customer applications such as Siebel eSales, Siebel eService do not use high interactivity framework, and are called standard interactivity applications.
Some of the differences between standard and high interactivity applications are as follows:
Support for client-side scripting. Client-side scripting is available for high and standard interactivity applications. The main difference here is that in high interactivity, customers have access to Siebel objects through which they can build data validation logic on the client side to further reduce the number of page refreshes needed for high interactivity applications.
Support for interactive controls. High interactivity applications employ specialized JavaScript controls for drop-downs, date and time, lists, and so on. These controls provide greater levels of interactivity than traditional HTML controls that appear in standard interactivity applications. For example, the list control supports resizing of columns, and drop-down lists support auto-completion.
Support for Application level menus. Application level menus require support for Java applets. Since there is no support for Java applets in standard interactivity, there are no application level menus.
Support for Implicit save. High Interactivity applications support an implicit save model whereby navigating off a record causes the changes to be saved for that record. In standard mode, an explicit save needs to be invoked which means users must physically press a save button to commit any changes to the database. Simply stepping off a record in standard mode will lose all changes made to that record.
Now that you have a basic understanding of the Siebel Enterprise framework, you’re going to have an opportunity to learn more about one of the Employee Applications called Siebel Call Center. You will learn the basics of:
- Navigation within the application
- Working with data
- Controlling the presentation of data within the User Interface
This is just an introduction to the Siebel application. As you progress through this training, you will learn the skills necessary to configure a Siebel application similar to the one you’re about to walkthrough.
Print off the Siebel 7 Application Walkthrough document to begin the activity.
After you log in you will see your home page. This is an example of a typical home page for a Siebel employee.
This page displays:
Links to the screens you use most often which allows you to get to work immediately
Your calendar which allows you to view your tasks and appointments in a daily, weekly, or monthly format on the home page
Personalized content based on login
Drill down on hyperlink for more detail
Now that you have completed this module, you should be able to :
Explain what Siebel is
Explain Siebel's core modules
Describe the type of Siebel Applications
Describe the types of User Interfaces
Discuss the Siebel Client and it's major features