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Your sales partners are the heart of the sales channel and so it is important to maintain partner information as accurately as possible. At least one employee of the enterprise, known as the channel administrator, is responsible for managing your sales partners information.
Earlier releases of the Comergent eBusiness System distinguished between two types of partners: indirect commerce and direct commerce.
In this release, all partners support both modes of commerce and so the Comergent eBusiness System no longer distinguishes between these two types of partner.
CHAPTER 7, Channel Administration describes the tasks you use to manage your channel partners.
The channel administrator uses the Partner Profile pages to provide the information required to integrate the partner with your Comergent eBusiness System. The information is maintained using the C3 Profile Manager application and the information is stored in the Knowledgebase.
The information you provide includes:
This information becomes important when you define your price lists. For example, when you define a price list, you can define pricing rules that enable special prices for partners who have a particular level or customer type. See Making Price Lists Available to Customers for more information.
When you create the profile, you can also enable the partner for C3 Partner.com. See Using C3 Partner.com for more information.
Your partners may have their companies divided into complex organizational structures. For example, a partner may comprise management companies, divisions, locations, and departments. A partner could even have more complicated structures such as franchises and retail outlet chains. In Release 6.0 or higher, you can mirror these complex structures by creating not simply a partner but a hierarchy belonging to a partner.
For example, in Figure 1, Partner A comprises four divisions: three immediately below it in the hierarchy and a fourth division as a child of Division A3. The enterprise for which Partner A is a partner can set up a profile for each of these entities that reflects the hierarchy.
To do this, you create the Partner A profile first, then within the Partner A profile, a Hierarchy tab enables you to create a profile for each of the children: A1, A2, A3. The profile for Division A3 contains a Hierarchy tab, where you can create a profile for its child, Division A3-1. The hierarchy structure supports an unlimited number of nodes.
See CHAPTER 7, Channel Administration for a step-by-step description of the tasks involved.
In addition to creating and maintaining profiles for each partner in the sales channel, the channel administrator creates, for each partner, one partner user with the profile administrator function. This partner user then becomes the partner administrator who creates the other partner users for their organization.
Partner administrators can log into the enterprise site to maintain partner information. They can create partner users and modify their partner profile as necessary. The partner administrator can assign a locale for each user, as well as maintain products and prices.
In addition to the DirectUser user type, direct commerce partners can be assigned another user type: ProcurementUser. The ProcurementUser user type is assigned to a user that is created to facilitate punchin from an external system. See the Comergent eBusiness System Implementation Guide for more information about punchin from an external system.
Every profile and every partner user has a status: they determine what partner users can do. See User Statuses for more details about user statuses.
In Release 7.0.1 the following profile statuses are defined:
Functionally, On Hold and On Credit Hold have the same effect, but the intention is that you use On Credit Hold to manage issues associated with orders being bought on account whereas On Hold should be used for more general business issues.
When a partner is a child of another partner, then the effective status of the child partner is inherited from the parent's profile status. For example, suppose that Partner B is the child of Partner A, and that the status of Partner B is Open. If you set the status of Partner A to On Credit Hold, then even though you have not changed the status of Partner B, the effective status of Partner B is inherited to be On Credit Hold. Consequently, Partner B users cannot place orders.
A parent's profile status overrides a partner's profile status if the parent's status is more restrictive: In the example above, if the profile status of Partner A is set to Closed, then the effective profile status of Partner B is also Closed, irrespective of the profile status of Partner B.
In Release 6.0 and higher, there is a business rule which enables you to set spending limits for partner users who are either self-registered or direct commerce users. Along with the limits, you define approvers for these users who can approve orders above the spending limit. For the approver name, you must enter a valid username within the same hierarchy as the user for whom you are establishing the spending limit.
These users, in turn, have their own spending limits and their own approvers. See To Create a User for instructions on creating a partner user.
When a user places an order whose value is above their spending limit, the designated approver can accept or reject the order. If the approver accepts the order, but if the order value is above their spending limit, then the order moves to that person's designated approver, and so on until an appropriate level is reached. At that point, the order is finally placed.
When you create or modify a user, you can designate that user as being a proxy for approvals for certain users. You enter these user's usernames in a Proxy for Approvals field in the user profile. When you do so, you are designating that the user defined by the profile can approve any orders for which the users listed in the Proxy for Approvals field are approvers.
Occasionally, in a partner hierarchy, a user belonging to a partner needs to be moved between levels in a hierarchy. For example, a user in one division is transferred to another division. Typically, this is something a partner administrator would do. If necessary, however, the enterprise administrator can perform this function. See To Move Users Between Levels in a Profile Hierarchy.
If you move a user between two node levels of a partner hierarchy, then the function assigned to the user before the move are retained. If you move a user from the partner level to a node level (or the reverse), then the functions assigned to the user revert to the default functions assigned at the destination.
Moving a user does not move any carts, orders, and so on, associated with the user. When you move a user to another level in the partner hierarchy, notify the administrator for the level from which the user has been moved. The administrator for that level can recover these carts, orders, and so on, using the steps described in To Recover Carts.
The users associated with a partner must have a means to order products in the product catalog. As shown in Figure 2, the price lists provide this means. A price list consists of a list of products and can be assigned to one or more partners. In this way, the user sees the products in the price lists assigned to the partner.
See Setting Prices for Products for a more detailed discussion about price lists and pricing.
The price list assignment to partner also enables you to maintain special prices for certain partners. This is done through conditional rules, that is, defining certain prices depending on certain qualities of the partner (for example, membership level, and so on.). See Setting Prices for Products for a more detailed discussion of conditional pricing.
Once the channel administrator has added all the partners to the Comergent eBusiness System, and once users begin creating carts and placing orders, you can examine the business generated. You do this by searching for one or more partners and viewing the carts created by customers. In this way, you can get an idea of the kinds of products customers are buying. See To View Cart Activity for Selected Profiles.
From within C3 Profile Manager, you can also search for one or more partners, then select them for downloading to a tab-delimited text file. This enables you to open the files in a spreadsheet application, or even email the information as necessary.
You can set up a partner so that its users can place orders on account. See Payment Options. In this release of the Comergent eBusiness System, you can set an account limit on a partner. Initially, their outstanding credit is set to the same amount. When users of this partner place orders on account, then the amount of their order is subtracted from their partner's outstanding credit. If the outstanding credit falls below zero, then the current order is placed on hold, and subsequent orders placed on account are also placed on hold.
Orders placed on hold can be approved by users that have been assigned the Finance function. Partner users can continue to place orders by credit card, but they cannot place any more orders on account until the outstanding credit is increased above zero again.
The outstanding credit amount can be increased by posting XML messages into the Comergent eBusiness System. Contact your Comergent Technologies, Inc. representative for details.
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