Staggered decomposition
Summarize
Summary of Staggered decomposition
Staggered decomposition allows ServiceNow customers to decompose customer orders in multiple iterations rather than all at once after order approval. This approach enables order fulfillment even when service and resource orders depend on varying factors such as customer needs or service availability at the customer's location. By decomposing orders in stages, domain orders (product, service, and resource orders) are created later in the fulfillment process using the most current information.
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Key Features
- Iterative decomposition: Begin decomposition with the available order data and defer domain orders that lack required information until later.
- Automatic retriggering: When missing characteristic values become available—either through manual user input or attribute propagation rules—the decomposition process automatically resumes for previously skipped domain orders.
- Improved flexibility: Supports scenarios where decomposition depends on dynamic or unavailable data at initial approval, unlike the traditional one-time decomposition that processes all domain orders immediately.
- Decomposition control: Once decomposition completes for domain orders, subsequent changes to characteristic values do not retrigger the process, ensuring stability.
How It Works
Upon order approval, the decomposition process creates domain orders based on available order information and catalog definitions. If characteristic values required by decomposition rules are missing, the process skips those domain orders. Later, when the missing values are provided or propagated, the system automatically retriggers decomposition for the skipped orders, completing the fulfillment process in stages.
Benefits for ServiceNow Customers
- Enables more accurate and timely order fulfillment by using the most up-to-date information.
- Increases order processing flexibility in complex scenarios with dependencies on variable data.
- Reduces the risk of incomplete or failed order decomposition due to missing information at initial approval.
Learn how you can stagger the decomposition for your customer orders. You can decompose your customer orders in multiple iterations by using the available information at the domain level, rather than decomposing an entire customer order at one time after it is approved for fulfillment.
Staggered decomposition helps you fulfill your customer orders even when service and resource orders were created from different factors, such as a customer's need, availability of the services at a customer's location, and so on. Staggered decomposition creates the domain orders (product, service, and resource orders) at a later stage during the order fulfillment process. The decomposition process is based on the latest information.
However, the one-time order decomposition process (before the staggered decomposition) works well when the products and services have the necessary information and order approval to create the domain orders for the order fulfillment.
The following diagram shows how the staggered decomposition process works in comparison to the standard order decomposition. You can start the decomposition process with the information that you already have for your order and order line items. The decomposition process skips the domain orders (product or service or resource orders) that you don't have the required information for at this time. When you add this information later, the decomposition process triggers and completes the processing for the remaining domain orders.
Contrast to earlier decomposition processing
Before staggered decomposition was available, order decomposition processing started immediately after a customer order was approved for fulfillment. Order decomposition was based on the specification relationships and decomposition rules that were defined in the product catalog.
If the decomposition rule depended on any characteristic value that was not available at the time of order decomposition, the order processing skipped the decomposition of orders. However, in staggered decomposition, with the initial decomposition, the decomposition automatically triggers again for the skipped orders when the dependent characteristic value is available. The characteristic value can be set by your order fulfillment users or by the attribute propagation rules.
How staggered decomposition works
To support order decomposition in a staggered manner, you can use this method to retrigger the decomposition process for the skipped domain orders when the characteristic values are assigned in the corresponding decomposition rules.
When you approve an order, the order decomposition process starts. The decomposition process creates domain orders by using the information that is available from the order, order line items, and catalog definition. It also evaluates the decomposition rules to create the target domain orders. If the decomposition feature fails to evaluate the decomposition rules due to the unavailability of characteristic values, the decomposition is stopped for those domain orders.
When the characteristic values are available either from a user’s action or from an attribute propagation rule, the decomposition process is retriggered. The process then creates the required domain orders and completes the order decomposition. If you again update the characteristic value after the order decomposition is complete, it does not trigger the decomposition for the domain order.
To understand staggered decomposition with the help of an example, see Customer order decomposition.