While capturing a customer order, the service provider may not have all the details for the customer order upfront, but still need to be able to capture minimum customer and product information that is available initially, rather than waiting until all the order details are available to configure final pricing and begin fulfillment.
As additional order details and information is captured, the order capture agent can continue to update the product offering with specification characteristic details.
The capability to capture light weight customer data initially allows the service provider to process the captured order to at least the point that initial pricing of the product offering can occur.
At a later point, when additional product offering specification characteristics is available, the order can be enriched then submitted and the fulfillment manager and or agent can begin managing the delivery of the order in the fulfillment phase.
This is a common service provider scenario for complex orders, where a subject matter expert, such as technical sales engineer will need to interact with the customer’s technical SME that is responsible for the solution design requirements that the service provider’s technical sales engineer, or solution engineer can then capture to complete configuration of product specification characteristics, at a later phase (enrichment) to enable fulfillment of the customer order.
For the Washington DC release - the order capture and enrichment feature incorporate feedback from customers to remove some of the enrichment weight from order capture and provide the option to quickly capture and enrich later.
This feature solves for the following order capture and enrichment use cases:
- As an order capture agent, I want to create new product and service orders for customers so that I can submit the orders for fulfilment to deliver the products and services to the customers.
- As an order capture agent, I want to enrich the newly submitted orders with additional details so that I can submit the orders with all required details for order fulfilment to avoid any delay and fallout because of missing or incorrect information.
- As an order capture agent, I want to create change, disconnect, suspend, and resume orders for the product and service inventory records so that I can submit the orders for fulfilment.
Order Capture and enrichment features:
- Submit order basic information with minimum details:
- Where the order capture agent can search, view, and select catalog items for new orders for products and services.
- Configure products and services:
- OMT UI provides a rich configurator UI to configure order line items and default customer order capture data, and further update order enrichment at a second capture phase. User can see all the order line-item related fields on one screen.
- Support product inventory configuration for MACD orders.
- Supports pricing and adjustments:
- Price calculated based on product configuration.
- Evaluates pricelist associated with products in catalog.
- Price calculated for order line items and order.
- Enrich orders with additional details:
- Supports enrichment state to capture additional details.
- Support configurator UI to capture OLI characteristic value.
- Supports workflow to create one or more enrichment tasks.
- Supports MACD orders.
- Supports workflow to create one or more enrichment tasks.
- Search and select product inventory records for MACD products and service orders.
- Supports future dated suspend and resume orders.
- Supports workflows for MACD enrichment orders.
Order capture UI version one vs Order Capture UI version two:
In version one of order capture, the order capture agent is expected to:
- capturing of product and service orders upfront for add, change, and disconnect orders and expects all mandatory attributes to be captured upfront.
- Order capture agent expected to get location details upfront, can’t add later for each product, no option to add later, for example for a 10-site customer order, agent may have only a few locations identified during initial capture.
- Is a standard form and list?
In version two of order capture UI:
- It’s a two-step process for capturing product and service orders for add, change, suspend, resume, and disconnect orders.
- Location information is optional in the first order capture phase and can be added later during order enrichment phase.
- Product and service attributes can be added later during order enrichment phase, so if a sales engineer is working with the customer to capture additional business requirements that will translate into product specification characteristic options, and or tasks that can be added during enrichment phase.
- The feature offers a rich UI experience for catalog search, order configuration, pricing, and adjustments.
Order capture and enrichment lifecycle flow – order and order line:
Order capture initial phase – capture minimum customer order details.
- Logged in as a fulfillment manager and selects an existing account, the fulfillment manager has the option to always create a new order for the account.
Order capture agent creates a new-add order for customer account:
Order capture agent captures the minimum required information for the order at capture phase:
- Notice contact is not a required field.
- User can select Add, Change, Disconnect, Suspend, Resume (No change and Move orders are not supported in Washington release
- Order capture agent captures enough (minimum) customer information to then selecting product offering.
Create a new order pop-up screen:
Selected Contact (optional at this stage), then select the order action: "Add".
After capturing the minimum order details required, the order can be created, and the order capture agent will Catalog search view - all the product catalog offerings available:
Catalog search can be selected to provide a hierarchical view of offerings available:
Order capture agent selects SD-WAN:
- Notice all available products for SD WAN category that the order capture agent can select from.
- Notice that it’s a card style layout of products.
- Pricing has default pricing that was configured for the offering. This can be repriced later.
- A customized button - so the order capture agent can customize the product offering if needed.
Selecting the SD-WAN Offering v3 for customization of order will trigger a call to the configurator UI.
All in one UI screen we are able to view:
- The parent specification, and child specifications
- What mandatory products are bundled for the catalog offering.
- Can select optional products that have been defined in the catalog for the offering.
- Option to change the quantity.
- Current selection – keeps track of what products, quantity and pricing selected (default pricing shown)
Configurator UI:
Selecting optional products updates, the current selection of products – SD-WAN Security product added as an optional (additional) product that can be selected with the SD-WAN Service Package bundled products.
Configurator UI:
Next, we will select the child product – SD WAN Controller and required characteristic that will impact pricing:
- In the old form, you would have had to go through a separate UI form to select characteristics options!
- Since the characteristic option is pricing impacting, pricing has been updated.
Configurator UI:
Let’s select SD-WAN Edge Device which has a few more product specification attributes that impact pricing for the offering.
- Noice that in current selection panel – the offerings pricing is updated.
- The configurator UI keeps all offering customization information in one UI view.
Configurator UI:
In summary – the order capture agent can fast track order capture due to less clicks, and all required product offering customization occurs in a single UI! User hitting the Add action will have OMT create the order line items of the order.
Configurator UI:
Viewing the order line items – we see we have four OLI's in the order.
- Notice that the order is still in "draft" state, we have not yet started to enrich the order.
Order UI form:
We are now ready to submit the order for enrichment, once we have reviewed – hit the “Review and Submit” button in upper right corner of previous screen.
In the Order UI summary view below, we see all the order details configured in one UI view.
- The initial summary view will have the Configuration in collapse view, but we selected detail view to see the configured attributes of the product specifications prior to submitting the order.
- Notice the edit icon in upper right corner; if the order capture agent is not happy with the configuration, selecting the edit icon, will bring back the configurator UI to change the specification configuration previous completed.
- If you want to dump and start over with a new order, you can delete the offering from the draft order.
Order summary UI view:
The order capture agent reviewed the order and order line configuration and is satisfied with the configurations selected and will submit the order for order enrichment.
- The order state will go from "draft" to "enrichment in progress". This is a new form for the order view, capture agent will see all order detail information in one summary view with some nice extras feature extras courtesy of Washington release!
- Customer account information
- Order is now in the “enrichment in progress” state.
- Number of Order line items and order line-item list view
- Order line-item state is submitted.
- Order overview information is displayed.
- Order breakdowns:
- New feature: View order timeline! There is an article on this feature in Community:
- View order orchestration
Order enrichment phase:
Enrichment is the phase where we have the enrichment tasks required for a technical SME to gather additional information required to fulfill the order to prevent fallout due to missing characteristic data or missing characteristic data.
Prior to this feature, the agent, when attempting to complete an order task step at runtime, if additional characteristic attribute information was required – would get a prompt that indicates missing order characteristic data required to complete the order task, then go into a separate tab (order characteristics) to add the data per characteristic, a bit tedious.
Let's look at enrichment workflow during order enrichment runtime phase.
At run time – the targeted enrichment flow will be assigned for a specification and offering to invoke the order enrichment flow. The Order Enrichment Flow Policy decision table must be configured. In a separate article we will speak more on creating the enrichment flow and configuring the decision table.
Order line-item enrichment is a pre-fulfillment workflow to allow for capturing additional technical data or non-technical data at the order line item; it can be specification related data or transient data for example, site layout information, which is not part of the catalog defined specifications. Currently, in the Washington DC release for OMT, transient characters (non-specification characteristics) are not selectable in the Configurator UI drop down.
In the below example, for the Order that is being enriched, the following enrichment order tasks have been defined in the enrichment flow, and the capture technical information task data will be selectable to be configured in the configurator UI.
Configurator UI in Washington release captures catalog defined characteristics, while capture site information (non-technical) will not be configurable characteristics to option in Configurator UI, but is manually selected, then optioned.
Enrichment order tasks - technical and non-technical:
Configurator UI - capture technical information:
Usually, the case is that for technical data, a technical SME such as an sales engineer will gather additional requirements information that at order capture time was not yet available, but is not required to initially configure the offering and pricing – for example, the customer may still be completing a solution design requirement and is waiting to get it approved, then will get back to the service provider’s technical sales engineer or solution architect to complete the product or service specification characteristics.
Order enrichment run time process UI screens:
In this example scenario, the user has defined an enrichment flow [at design time] that has enrichment order tasks defined that will be assigned to a subject matter expert to obtain additional domain order specification characteristic data required to deliver the ordered product and services for the customer.
At the time of initial customer order capture, the minimal specification characteristic details [enough to move the order to enrichment process] had been obtained.
This is a typical situation and experience for the service provider as we previously talked about, that when preparing to deliver a customer order, especially for complex orders - that require technical solutioning to be completed prior to order fulfillment, when customer technical requirements are not immediately available at the time of order capture, but enough is available to complete initial pricing of the offer.
Select the enrichment flow’s order task(s) to be assigned to a SME to complete:
After selecting the enrichment order task, a list view of the specification's characteristics will be listed:
Select the order characteristic to option:
The technical SME has completed all order enrichment characteristics optioning and can close the enrichment order task:
Assigned technical SME has completed enrichment tasks and closed his/her assigned task(s):
Viewing the order UI details - There are two enrichment tasks that the assigned technical SME closed:
- Noticed the order has moved from enrichment to “new” state.
- The customer order is now ready to be approved and moved to in progress state.
Order is now in “New” state and ready to be approved - all enrichment order tasks show completed:
As mentioned, an enrichment order task can be non-technical data required to be captured in the enrichment phase, for orders that require transient order data, but not required for catalog driven fulfillment - catalog specification driven.
Transient characteristic data will not be updated, stored in the product inventory, it is only around for the lifecycle of the order.
For non-technical, i.e., transient characteristics, select the transient characteristic task defined, in this example, it is Capture site information:
Select the transient characteristic and fill in the information required:
Then save:
This concludes the order Capture and Enrichment runtime process, forms and order task flow.
In the next article – we will go into the enrichment design time activities.
Please comment with any questions pertaining to the content of this article. Or some functionality of the feature that you feel needs more clarification.
