Informatica PowerCenter 8x Key Concepts – 2

The PowerCenter Repository is one of best metadata storage among all ETL products. The repository is sufficiently normalized to store metadata at a very detail level; which in turn means the Updates to therepository are very quick and the overall Team-based Development is smooth. The repository data structure is also useful for the users to do analysis and reporting.

Accessibility to the repository through MX views and SDK kit extends the repositories capability from a simple storage of technical data to a database for analysis of the ETL metadata.

PowerCenter Repository is a collection of 355 tables which can be created on any major relational database. The kinds of information that are stored in the repository are,

1. Repository configuration details
2. Mappings
3. Workflows
4. User Security
5. Process Data of session runs

For a quick understanding,

When a user creates a folder, corresponding entries are made into table OPB_SUBJECT; attributes like folder name, owner id, type of the folder like shared or not are all stored.
When we create\import sources and define field names, datatypes etc in source analyzer entries are made into opb_src and OPB_SRC_FLD.
When target and related fields are created/imported from any database entries are made into tables like OPB_TARG and OPB_TARG_FLD.
Table OPB_MAPPING stores mapping attributes like Mapping Name, Folder Id, Valid status and mapping comments.
Table OPB_WIDGET stores attributes like widget type, widget name, comments etc. Widgets are nothing but the Transformations which Informatica internally calls them as Widgets.
Table OPB_SESSION stores configurations related to a session task and table OPB_CNX_ATTR stores information related to connection objects.
Table OPB_WFLOW_RUN stores process details like workflow name, workflow started time, workflow completed time, server node it ran etc.
REP_ALL_SOURCES, REP_ALL_TARGETS and REP_ALL_MAPPINGS are few of the many views created over these tables.

PowerCenter applications access the PowerCenter repository through the Repository Service. The Repository Service protects metadata in the repository by managing repository connections and using object-locking to ensure object consistency.

We can create a repository as global or local. We can go for‘global’ to store common objects that multiple developers can use through shortcuts and go for local repository to perform of development mappings and workflows. From a local repository, we can create shortcuts to objects in shared folders in the global repository. PowerCenter supports versioning. A versioned repository can store multiple versions of an object.

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Auditing Best Practices on a button Click – EScript doc

Prevention is better than precaution” An audit (ES Review) was conducted for the previous project and the report stated that most of the Siebel best practices were not implemented which led to poor performance of the application. Sometimes we used to perform the hectic job of copying each and every script manually to a word document for script documentation.

After the project was over, a thought came into my mind, why not to prepare a tool that would scan the script, check for the Siebel best practices implementations and would generate a word document regarding the same, in addition to this if this tool would also copy the script into word document then it would be like a “red cherry on the cake.” So I prepared a tool named escript doc aud

• eScript Auditor is an audit tool developed in VB .Net 2005 which checks whether the script has followed Siebel Best practices and documents the entire code in a word document

Features:

The major feature of the escript doc aud is that it documents and audits every script written at the following level:

• Application

• Business Service

• Business Component

• Applet

Working:

Search for the required object script for which you need to mention the object name in search textbox shown above with selecting appropriate script type and click “Go” button
Respectively a script will be displayed under script area also with all the non followed best practices (highlighted in red shown in above picture)
If required hit “Create Script Area Doc” button to generate a word document for that particular script along with its non followed best practices.
Advantages:

• Can copy thousands of lines of code (LOC) in couple of minutes.

• Reduces the manual effort required.

• In fraction of second audits the entire script.

Script Doc Aud gives the customer friendly GUI to see each script and perform best practice violation check up.
To know more about EScript doc

Hexalyzer- An analyzer tool to view Siebel repository

The ever changing needs and requirement of Business Process makes it imperative for the clients to upgrade from their previous Siebel versions to the latest one.Besides providing better usability and customer satisfaction, upgradation also provides access to new functionality and software applications.

Upgradation facilitates compliance at a lower cost of maintenance and ongoing operations. By providing “out-of-the-box” solution to requirements upgradation helps to increase the efficiency of the applications and businessWhile we were upgrading from Siebel 7.8 to Siebel 8.0, we faced various challenges during the upgrade such as:-

Analyze Repository and generate detail report of the customized Siebel objects

In order to find the information about customized objects every time users are required to fire a query which slows the response time and increases the load on database.

Unfortunately due to time constraint and unavailability of Hexalyzer tool forced us to perform various lengthy but important tasks manually. This was the time when we realized to come up with a tool which would help the upgrade process to take place faster thereby saving lots of time.

The thought process results in Hexalyzer, to generate the report of all the customized objects based on Inactive objects

Count-list of new and modified objects

Hexalyzer has the major advantage of reducing the overload of bulk operations performed on the database.

Hexalyzer automates many such steps and helps the customer to get a broader view of the entire repository. For example by clicking the “New Applet” button the tool will generate an excel sheet with the information of all the new applets created during Upgrade process. Similarly, if one clicks “Modified Views” the information exported to the excel sheet contains the entire modified Views name during the Upgrade process.
This tool is now the part of Post Upgrade task for me and my team. Hexalyzer identifies and reports all the customized objects from the start baseline date for the repository.

Solutions / questions / comments are always welcome.

Thanks for reading this blog.To know more about Hexalyzer

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

AUTO SAD-Siebel Administration Automation Tool

Auto Sad is a production support tool that automates and provides a faster mechanism to perform Siebel Administrative Tasks on clicks of some buttons on multiple servers.

Siebel Architecture involves the following Servers

• Siebel Server

• Siebel Gateway Name Server

• Siebel Web Server

These servers may or may not be on the same machine.

As a system administrator, one often has to do repetitive tasks such as

• Bouncing of Services(Starting or stopping services)

• Migrating SRF from one location to another

• Compilation of Siebel Repository File(SRF)

• Generate Browser Scripts.

To perform these tasks the Siebel Administrator needs to login into each server remotely and then execute them. If there are only a handful of servers, this task may not be very intimidating, but there are many times when there are many servers installed on separate machines. This is where Auto Sad comes into the picture which automates the whole process. Using Auto Sad, a Siebel Administrator can perform all the basic tasks by entering required values in their profile and then by click on buttons those tasks can be performed.

AUTO SAD tool involves various steps such as:

1. Login through sadmin credentials
2. Create/Edit Environment Profile
3. Generate batch Files for individual tasks
4. Execute Batch Files for the required tasks
5. Launch Siebel Thin Client

From the above screenshot, it is clear that the various administrative tasks can be performed easily by simply click of buttons thereby facilitating the Siebel administrator to work efficiently.Any organization implementing Siebel can make use of this tool to achieve faster and convenient way to perform Siebel Administrative Tasks thereby saving 30% of the time for deployment process.

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Computer and Telephone going hand in hand

Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) as the name suggests, is a technology that allows the interactions between a computer and a telephone to be integrated or synchronized.

CTI systems can take several types of inputs including a voice input from Interactive Voice Response systems (IVR) or email, fax and web etc.

Where is CTI used?
Depending on the business type and real time interactivity, we need to decide whether we can go with this approach.
For e.g. In an Online, Help/Solution providing firm, Tele-marketing centers or a Call Center the telephone usage would be high. This means if the business is telephone intensive then we might use this approach so that it would be easy to trace the calls and the caller information.

How to implement CTI in Siebel?
Depending on the business requirements either of the following approaches can be used to implement CTI setup for Siebel Call Center Application
It’s a faster approach as compared to the second one. It uses the vendor specific library which has the configuration parameters required for the setup.
This includes the development of certain customized web services and usage of the ASI s.

Example: Scenario where IVR triggers CTI
In our scenario, various methods of customized Business service for IVR trigger the middleware and the middleware further invokes the CTI module.
These methods need to be exposed as web services to publish them on the web at the host address. This host address is specified by the path which is same as the one where we need to get the CTI toolbar and CTI services enabled.
In all, the Business service methods act as the traversing points through which the CSR can navigate to the specified view, taking the output arguments from the function as the input CED (Caller Entered Digit) data for the CTI system.
CTI Applications:

What CTI can do and why is it preferred?

• Displays the complete call information

• Authenticates the caller

• Agent state information can also be displayed

• Can receive fax messages and route it to respective recipients

Greater efficiency
Dialing out automatically with a single mouse click from a computer saves time and is more accurate.
Staff can handle more calls in a given period of time.

Logging calls, allows monitoring the effectiveness of :

• Operating procedures

• Individual staff members.

• Improved Customer Service

• Receiving customer details on screen at the same moment you receive the incoming call.

• Automatically seeing key details about that customer.

• Automatic call distribution (ACD) automatically answers calls with a voice menu, and uses caller responses to route incoming calls.

Challenges in setting up a CTI Systems:

If IVR is used for triggering purposes, then the Web service response time can be a hurdle in case of screen pops configured in the CTI system.

There could be some cases, where the vanilla views can’t be used for displaying the complete info, so lot more customizations are to be done.

Navigating between various screens could be time consuming.Screen transfer between agents could be difficult to implement.As the implementation (Middleware used) is Vendor dependent, the functionalities and services provided also differ. Hence, there is a difficulty in choosing among the various vendors.

As the CTI services are server dependent, there is always a difficulty in maintaining those IC servers
Network congestion could also hamper the CTI response time.

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Sales Cycle & Siebel Sales Application

Introduction to Sales Cycle
Sales Cycle plays a critical role in Customer Relationship Management. It is critical in a way because it is the initial point of contact for any customer. For any CRM application it is important to understand the Sales Cycle. The Sales Cycle starts from Prospecting and ends when a deal is closed and the revenue is realized.
There are various steps involved in an end-to-end Sales Cycle.

1. Prospecting:It involves creating the target database.
2. Lead Generation: A lead is an expressed interest shown by the prospects. It is used by a sales agent to determine whether there is a potential for some sales opportunity.
3. Opportunity Creation: nce a lead is qualified, an opportunity is created.
4. Quote Generation: Sales agent prepare quotes to communicate prices, discounts and special offers that are associated with a product/service which is part of a sale.
5. Order Creation:Once the quote is accepted it is converted into an order.
6. Closure:The deal is closed once the order is created.

The Sales Cycle may differ to some extent depending upon the type of business. But a typical sales cycle would follow the above mentioned steps.
Mapping the Sales Cycle with SIEBEL Sales Application
Following are the important business entities involved in Siebel Sales Application:

1. Accounts
2. Contacts
3. Opportunities
4. Quotes

The lead that is generated through various sources is captured in Accounts screen. It captures the details like – Account Name, Address, Status of the Account (i.e. whether the Account is active/inactive, Qualified, contract pending etc), Account Type (i.e. whether the Account holder is an existing customer, Business, Competitor or Vendor etc.) within the Account Screen.
The Accounts Screen is then linked to Opportunities, Contacts and Quotes.
The Opportunities Screen will have the details such as opportunity name, account name to which it is associated, revenue that could be generated from the opportunity, sales stage (prospecting, qualification, closing, lost), name of sales team, lead quality(excellent, very high, high, fair, poor) etc.
The Contacts Screen will have details such as name of the person, phone number, job title, name of the account, address etc. The Quotes Screen will have details related to the quotes that have been generated for a particular order.
The quotes may undergo some iteration if there is any negotiation between the two parties. A Quote Screen will typically have the Quote name & number, Revision, date of creation, name of the account to which it is associated, name of sales rep, Status (whether the quote is approved, accepted, in-progress, active etc.)

Advantages of Siebel Sales Application
Following are the advantages of Siebel Sales Application:

1. Siebel Sales simplifies and optimizes the task of planning and managing the sales process by providing complete visibility into the sales cycle, helping companies to plan and manage effective selling activities.
2. By bringing business activity information closer to the user, displayed in one place, sales people can find what they need to work on and then quickly navigate to that object within the application.
3. Each organization may use slightly or sometimes greatly different terminology. Often applications will use industry standard terminology that is not necessarily applicable to a particular organization. Customization allows each customer to use their own chosen terminology. This way it cuts down on time that is required to train users on what each field is for and thus allowing for a more seamless transition to a new application.

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