New functionality to separate different user groups and their data in Oracle Sales Cloud have been added under the concept of ‘Business Units’. Business Units are the excellent solutions to implement multiple divisions into one Sales Cloud instance, whilst keeping the ability to do global reporting across all business units.
Business Units is – as every new feature in Sales Cloud as of Release 10 – an ‘opt-in’ feature that needs to be enabled by administrators. So if you want to try it out and do not see if when connecting to Sales Cloud, do not forget that it needs to be activated on your instance!
How it works
Every user in Oracle Sales Cloud always had to be created against a Business Unit. So far, only the Incentive Compensation module within Oracle Sales Cloud actively used this concept to carve out user group. Now finally the rest of Sales Cloud is up taking this concept to group users and data.
Once a user creates a new opportunity or a new lead, these automatically will be created against the Business Unit of the user that created it. If a user is working for multiple Business Units, then the user can off course choose for which Business Unit the opportunity needs to be created.
Visibility to whom can see this opportunity can now be regulated again by Territory Management where the Business Unit dimension can be used to separate data between user groups.
Reference Data
Besides carving up user groups and separating transaction data like opportunities and leads amongst them, Business Units can be used to specify reference data for the different user groups.
For each of the Business Units, specific list of values can be created for:
- Opportunity Sales Process, Sales Status and Sales Stages
- Opportunity Win/Loss Reasons and the Opportunity Closing Process
- Opportunity Decision Level, Level of Risk, Strategic Value and other List of Values
- Lead Registration Type, Lead Rank, Lead Reject Reasons, Lead Retire Reasons and other List of Values
and much more
Default for each of these types of reference data for each of the Business units can be set off course also.
Configuration Options
Having Business Units now in Sales Cloud allows us to use them when configing and extending Sales Cloud also:
- Dynamic layouts can be created to allow different users from different Business Units to see different screen, with different fields, buttons, subtabs, …
- Separate Triggers, Validation Rules and Workflows can be created for each of the Business Units
- Lead to Opportunity Conversion mapping can be made Business Unit specific
- …
Importing Business Unit specific Data
When importing data for Oracle Sales Cloud or to be processed by the Incentive Comp calculation engine, you need to import them against the Business Unit for which the data is relevant. In order to do so, the imported data needs to be enriched with the corresponding Business Unit ID.
Here is how you can find it:
- Log in as an administrator
- In the navigator choose ‘Setup and Maintenance’
- Search for task names ‘Manage Business Unit’
- The default search results contains a list of business units
- Under ‘View’, under ‘Columns’, add the ‘Business Unit ID’
