Siebel CRM - Setting Up and Managing the Position Hierarchy

Employees are not associated directly with organizations. Siebel CRM uses a mechanism named positions to define both the association of an employee to an organization as well as the reporting relationship or hierarchy of the positions.

Positions represent a job entitlement for which people are recruited and subsequently paid. Employees can hold more than one position, for example to take over a colleague's job during vacation or sickness. Positions can also be held by multiple employees, which is unlikely for a CEO position but maybe more likely for sales representative or call center agent positions.

Each position can be assigned as a parent position to multiple child positions, thus enabling the administrator to create the so-called reporting hierarchy, which defines both the career level and the data access rights of an employee who is assigned to the position. The following diagram depicts a typical position hierarchy and indicates that each position must be assigned to exactly one division or organization:

Positions within a single hierarchy can be associated with divisions or organizations that might be unrelated to each other. This provides a high level of flexibility, which allows administrators to implement almost every organizational setup.

Administrators enter the position hierarchy with guidance from the documents delivered by the business analyst team in the Administration - Group screen's Positions view, which is shown in the following screenshot:

In the above example, the administrator has finished entering the positions depicted in the above diagram. The explorer applet allows administrators to verify the reporting hierarchy defined by the parent position fi eld. The Division field is a mandatory field. It allows an administrator to select any division (marked as organization or not) and associate it with the position.

Use the example position hierarchy described above to implement sample positions in your demonstration environment.