Use collections strategies as an alternative to dunning plans, to automate the collections management process and support complex collections activities. Strategies can be used to recover delinquent transactions such as invoices from Oracle Receivables, cases as identified by Oracle Lease and Finance Management, or loan transactions from Oracle Loans.
Note: Use either strategies or dunning plans to manage your delinquencies, but not both methods.
A strategy is a series of manual or automated tasks, known as work items, linked together in the order in which they will be executed. Each work item is a collection activity to recover a delinquency, such as making a phone call or sending a letter, and can be reused and included in many strategies. A strategy is associated with a collections object, such as customers or accounts. The collections object is the data level you do business at.
Strategies leverage the information from the Oracle Advanced Collections scoring engines that identify delinquent transactions and rank delinquent objects. Based on the score results, the Strategy Management concurrent program assigns appropriate strategies to the collections objects. When a strategy runs, it uses:
Oracle Workflow to initiate and manage work items, and to send notifications to designated personnel
Oracle Human Resources to identify the best collector or specialist for a work item based on the skills required to complete the work item
Note: You need to have the full installation of Oracle HRMS for strategies to use skills, but you can create strategies without skills on a shared Oracle HRMS deployment.
Oracle XML Publisher to send correspondence
Oracle database views to create segments for strategies to target groups of similar customers or transactions
Oracle Universal Work Queue to display the collector's work item assignments
Earlier, strategies could be run at one level per install (either at party level or at account level or at bill to site level or delinquency level) based on the operational setup in the Collections Checklist using the Collections Administrator responsibility. Now, you can assign different levels to different parties and run strategies at different Operating Unit Levels. You can run strategies at multiple levels and view UWQ at different operating units levels for different nodes (Delinquencies, Broken Promises and Strategy Work items nodes) and also run strategy management concurrent program for different levels of parties and different operating units.
The Collections strategy is derived and assigned from the Scoring Engine components when the Strategy engine is run based on the Operating Unit parameter. Strategy Management concurrent program runs to assign work items based on score of delinquent invoices and tracks the strategies that are in progress. The program then compares the object's score with available strategies ranks and assigns appropriate strategies. It also creates work items in active strategies.
The operational level setup in the Checklist allows you to override system level defaults for each party in the collections workbench. The collection agent can default the strategy level (either at party level or at account level or at bill to site level or delinquency level) for each operating unit by mapping levels with each operating unit level in operational setup.
To set up and use strategies, complete the following Checklist tasks: