Background Processes

When using CX Sales, completely invisible to users, a few background processes could or should be run once in a while, or periodically in order to optimize your CX Sales experience.

There are not many and they are easy to run:

• log on to as an Administrator
• choose ‘Scheduled Processes’ from the navigator
• schedule a new Process
• search for any of the processes listed below
• use the correct scheduling parameters to have this process run as often as you need
• submit the process

Here are the ones I tend to make sure run on the instances I work on:

Import Marketing E-Mail Interactions

As described in this post, this process makes sure that all emails generated by Sales Campaigns are attached as a completed activity to the contact that has received the email.  This gives the sales team insight in which emails have been sent over time.

When using Sales Campaigns, this process would be an excellent candidate to be scheduled maybe every night so that the emails sent throughout the previous day become visible of the sales teams the next day.

Generates Sales Historical Snapshots

Also already featured on my blog is a process that takes regular snapshots of the opportunity data so that the status of opportunities as they were captured with these snapshots can be compared over time.  It helps in understanding which sales stages take a long time, which opportunities are progressing as expected and which ones are not.  It provides extra insight into the sales funnel or forecast without needing a data warehouse, which is the typical tool that provides such information.

Schedule this process to be run periodically as fits your organization, from daily to weekly, preferably overnight.

Refresh BI Reports Audit Data for User Adoption Reporting

In order to make all audit data available in OTBI, and use that data for user adoption measurement purposes, this process should be scheduled.

Personally, I do not see a need for this process to be scheduled more often than just once a day.

Synchronize database search indexes for CRM objects

This background process will index all changed data records to make sure the search engine can find the latest data quickly.

There is absolutely no harm in scheduling this process every 5 minutes as only the latest changes get processed.

Refresh Denormalized Time Dimension Table for BI

Besides working with an ordinary calendar, CX Sales works also with an enterprise or fiscal calendar.  This allows the forecast and reporting engine in CX Sales to calculate what the pipeline in Q3 is even if that Q2, like for Oracle, starts September 1st instead of April 1st.

In order to help the BI engine with these aggregations, each time the calendar is changed, this process has to run.  It therefore always has at least to be run once per implementation and then every time the calendar gets changed off course.

Refresh Revenue Metrics

Refreshes revenue metrics on a timely basis (including closed revenue and pipeline revenue)

Generate Relevancy Feed

Generate Relevancy Feed will recreate upon execution the workspace and actionable infolet smartlists. Combining information a user has recently created, updated or accessed with information that soon will need attention, this background process will generate personalized smartlists.

Update Aggregates

In order for the workspace aggregates to populate, make sure this process is scheduled

Run Geocode Generation

Some of these processes have their own setup and maintenance screen in order to be scheduled.  This process cannot be started from the ‘Scheduled Processes’ screen but has to be started from the ‘Run Geocode  Generation’ task screen under ‘Setup and Maintenance’

This job will for each of the addresses in CX Sales compute the longitude and latitude coordinates so the addresses can be visualized on a map and in the ‘Around Me’ feature on Oracle CX Mobile.  As these coordinates need to be added or updated as soon as a new address is added, or an address is updated, I guess scheduling this process to be run once a day or even more frequently would be a good idea.