Siebel Business Solution Tool – Adding value for our customers

As a Siebel Consulting firm, our sales team hunts for prospective clients. Once the client is acquired, cost estimation and resource allocation are vital processes before kick starting the project. After lots of hard work and hurdles (difficulties / issues) the development team comes up with the product.

Do the developers ponder on the modules they developed and its viability for client ? Do they go back and see how end users are using it? What value the Client is deriving, out of the application/product’s usage?

One day the above unanswered questions resurfaced on my head. By gathering some techno-functional expertise, I attempted to answer the above questions. I shared these views with my seniors, and eventually got the nod to work on Development of a Business Solution Tool. Some of the salient features of this Business solution tool are as follows:

• Automated Siebel CRM Tool that captures the usage details of the application.
• It keeps track of every user’s login details to the application and the number of views that are traversed by the user.

The above requirement was a challenge and I was looking forward to develop something which would give add-on value for our Clients.

Few of these challenges were:

• Calculating cost effectiveness – capturing the time spent by the end user on a particular view of the application.
• Keeping Track of time spent by each user in the application.
• Statistics w.r.t the heavy and sparing use of the views in the application.

After overcoming the obstacles faced, the development of the Business Tool was done in 2 weeks time. After testing, re-tesing and ensuring the product was bug-free, the Tool was served on the platter of our client. Couple of features of the Tool was cited as below followed by the screenshot:

• Keeps track of Login details of the users. “Login name” and “Application In-Out time.
• Keeps track of Time spent by each user in a particular view. “View In-Out time”.

This Tool will be helpful for the Client to find out the usage of application by their customers. Sometimes navigation becomes difficult to understand for the end users in Siebel. For e.g. The user is unable to some views due to the lack of knowledge of navigation. This tool fulfills that requirement too.

After the development of an Application, the most important benefit our Client derive out of this tool is as follows:

• Calculate Cost Effectiveness of Siebel System with respect to Time and Efficiency.

Solutions / questions / comments are welcome.

Thanks for reading this blog. To know more about Siebel Business Solution Tool

Oracle Fusion Middleware

Applications can be integrated using either of the following integration solutions:

• P2P (Point To Point) – It involves creating a direct connection between each pair of application to be integrated.
• Hub-and-Spoke – It involves connecting each application to a central integration server running middleware.

In comparison to P2P integration strategy, Hub-and-Spoke methodology is preferred. Adding an additional application requires only one new data transport to and from the integration server. The numbers of data transports are reduced from n² to n.

Oracle provides a strong Integration Server architecture known as Oracle Fusion Middleware Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) suite. This architecture comprises of Oracle Application server, Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), Business Process Execution Language Process Manager (BPEL PM) and other components for security, BI, administration, monitoring etc.

1. Oracle Application Server provides a J2EE container for other applications and third party applications.
2. ESB is an engine which routes and transforms the data. It can have multiple data entry points.
   Example – The source and target systems are having different schemas. Data transformation can be done using Siebel data mapper and can be transported using the Business Service. The same requirement can also be solved using ESB service. Apart from this, ESB service can be initiated from Siebel CRM after importing the “wsdl” of the Outbound Web Service.
3. BPEL PM automates the business processes across multiple applications. It uses a visual coupled with programmatic constructs.
   Example – Combined information from Siebel CRM, Credit Card Company and a shipping company to generate final form of order. BPEL PM can be used to orchestrate and automate these multiple applications using a single entry point.

SOA suite resides on the Integration Server (IS). Siebel CRM lies on one side of the IS and third party applications reside on other side of the IS. Siebel can thus behave as a Sender or Receiver.

Read More about Oracle Fusion Middleware

Scripting Limitations in Siebel CRM

There are nearly 200 different types of objects that can be configured in Siebel to reflect the changes in the User Interface Layer, Business Objects Layer and the Data Objects Layer. Being a Siebel Professional, I often come across complex business Requirements that cannot be met solely by configuration. Siebel Scripting is great for handling these complex needs. But there are a few limitations to be considered while using scripting in Siebel development.

• 16 KB Size limitation
  In Siebel eScripting, a single method can contain only 16KB of code. But in real life, one may have to go in for heavy customizations of Siebel objects for which 16KB is just not enough. My workaround in such cases is to split large methods into smaller methods.
• Cannot mix scripting languages in an object
  Most scripting in Siebel is in eScript. But, sometimes we need to use third party system/objects like ActiveX/COM where VBscript is the preferred language. So how do we get to external objects like ActiveX/COM objects from a Siebel Object coded in eScript given that we are not allowed to mix scripting languages in an object?. The solution is that we call another Siebel Object which is scripted in VBscript through which we can finally access the external system/object. This solution works fine. But it does lead to performance issues. Better ideas are welcome
• Dynamic switching between server and browser side script not possible.
  We can call server script from browser script. But once server script starts executing, it is not possible to call browser script. So, it is not possible to do things like call pop-up a message on the browser side after executing say 10 lines of code on server side. If anyone has any workarounds, please do let me know.
• Object has to be compiled after every modification.
  Till Siebel 7.8, developers had to compile and re-compile modified objects a every minor change in code. This is a big pain while debugging and a major time-waster. But in the latest version 8.0, Siebel provides “Fix and Go” option with ST Engine which has addressed this limitation. Thank you Siebel!!!
• Scripts are not always upgradeable.
  Scripts often give errors while upgrading a Siebel Application from one version to another. At times we have had to comment out entire sections so that the technical upgrade can complete. Finding all these problem areas in the script and fixing them is a big challenge during upgrades.

Feel free to comment/discuss/debate!

Read More about Siebel CRM

Introducing Siebel Street

I would like to welcome you to Hexaware’s Siebel blog– “Siebel Street”. Hexaware’s Siebel practice has been doing wonderful things and we would like to share some of them with you through Siebel Street. In this first post I will introduce the Siebel CRM and describe its capabilities. I will end with giving a sneek peek at some of the forthcoming posts in this blog.

Siebel has been the market leader in the CRM space for more than a decade. It started with a sales-force automation software and then expanded into marketing and customer service applications. It was taken over by Oracle in 2005. Today, Siebel CRM is at the forefront of Oracle’s CRM product strategy. Siebel’s CRM Suite caters to clients in the BFSI, Telecom, Pharmaceuticals , Retail , HI-tech Manufacturing and Transportation verticals among others. Siebel’s Technical architecture provides a top-notch user interface, strong integration, diversified industry-wide applications, easy upgrades and reliable customer support.

Most customers need to change the Siebel application by modifying delivered functionality or by implementing new modules. The customizations in the Siebel applications are implemented using Configuration, Scripting and Workflows. Siebel also provides excellent data management capabilities. Siebel EAI integrates third party applications/objects with Siebel and Siebel EIM populates external data in interface tables and user data in base tables. Siebel Analytics is the business Intelligence application from Siebel Systems. It has been rebranded as OBIEE and will form the centerpiece of Oracle’s BI Strategy.

In Siebel Street, contributors from Hexaware’s Siebel practice will blog about their experience with Siebel CRM and Siebel Analytics/ OBI-EE. We will describe the business and technical challenges, their resolutions and the benefits of our approach. We are working on the entire range of tools available on Siebel. Our team consists of experts in EIM, Config, Integration, ETL, Analytics, Administration and Testing. We will share our project experiences in these areas in the forthcoming posts.

In this month we will post on DAC, escripting etc. Watch this space..

Read More  about  Siebel Street