Activity Plans vs SMART Templates

I wrote a post recently about a new service offering I have been working on to greatly speed up process automation. So this is another entry into my teaser series. Let me start by describing what is probably Siebel's first and most basic attempt of process automation: the Activity Plan. Activity Plans have been around in Siebel going back a long time. I remember them in 2000 and they may have been there in 99.5 though to be honest I don't recall exactly when they made their appearance. Basically, an administrator creates an Activity Template consisting of a series of Activities. A user can then either automatically trigger the creation of an instance of this template (an Activity Plan) from an Opportunity Sales Stage transition or manually add one to any other object. Once the Plan is added, the Activities are automatically generated. This sounds great to a lot of business stakeholders as it sounds like something they can apply in many scenarios. It's strengths are:

• Can set any/all fields on an activity
• Creates many activities at once, saving manual effort.

Unfortuneately, once you start gathering any sort of requirements for a business process, you will start to stumble across the weaknesses:

• Fields can only be set to constant values (this really impacts dates when it comes to activities)
• Activities are created all at once, so any type of sequencing is impossible
• This functionality only exists for Activities (No Service Requests, or other custom objects)

Now with customization, there are ways to get around some of these limitations, but at some point, you will probably end up either building something completely different or bastardizing the Activity BC itself.

In my last post on this topic I introduced you to the RARE Engine (Rule-based Approvals Routing and Escalations). This is really two parts. I already touched on its features. There is actually a second component of my automation suite which I have branded SMART Templates. What a SMART Template does is to create a task record and set fields on that record, while addressing all of the deficiencies of the Activity Plan:

• Can create/update records of any type (administrator specifies the BC)
• Can evaluate fairly complex expressions including date math to set fields

And when used in combination with the RARE Engine:

• Records can be created in batches at different points in time, dependent on the completion of prior tasks.

OK, now we are getting somewhere. So once this service offering is implemented, any process can be maintained through the Siebel UI. You need to change the threshold at which a VP needs to approve an Order? No problem. You need to notify an additional person at a point in the New Customer Onboarding process? Ok. Or you need to create three new Service Requests when Final Contract approval is given? You got it. You want to update the quote status when the customer approves it through your eSales portal? You betcha. All these things can be done by an administrator in Real Time.

Just remember, most processes are just a series of steps executed by people or systems. What the RARE/SMART Suite provides is a way to implement automation quickly, maintain those steps in the Siebel GUI, and enrich the processes themselves (Reporting, Reliability, Refinement).