Region and region schema are the building blocks for defining geography in Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Foundation.
A region schema represents the complete set of regions that define a specific geographic area.
A region schema consists of a group of hierarchical regions. Each region is itself a set of other regions or a set of zip codes forming that region.
For example, the geographical definition of the USA could be:
Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Foundation provides a hierarchical way of defining regions so that aggregate regions could be defined easily and with the least amount of data entry.
Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Foundation has a broad functional footprint and sometimes a single way of defining and dividing geography may become very limiting. For example, how territories are defined for shipping may not be the same as required for providing installation services. For reasons like this, Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Foundation allows definition of as many Region Schemas as required. Organizations can then associate the right Region Schema for each of the following purposes:
Currently, region schema definition can be done only by the Hub (DEFAULT) organization. Enterprises can select the appropriate schema from the list of schema's that the hub has created. Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Foundation provides a basic schema definition for the United States (US) as an optional default setup. You can use this as a starting point for your schema definitions.
While region schemas can only be defined at the Hub level, they can be associated at the resource pool level. If a region schema is associated at the resource pool level, it serves as an override to the region schema at the provider organization level.
Since in any given schema, a large number of regions could be defined, the concept of region level is introduced to allow better manageability. Region level classifies regions into distinct categories to facilitate easier searches later. Examples of region levels would be "State", "City", and so forth. Region level also helps to prevent data entry errors. One-time setup defines what "level" can be a child of which "level". This helps in prevention of data entry errors such as adding a "State" to a "City" inadvertently.