The selling processes are responsible for managing prospective customers. They are also responsible for matching customer expectations by proposing appropriate products and services. The selling processes are accomplished through negotiations of features and product configurations, resulting in a customer order. These processes are also responsible for recording relevant customer information.

SimpleOrder along with its WCC solution supports prospect management over different sales channels to capture all relevant customer data. The SimpleOrder product configuration solution provides rule-based product configuration for customers that helps decide products and services based on service address, customer segmentation, sales channel, and product interdependence.

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RM&O Support and Readiness

SimpleOrder doesn't support RM&O Support & Readiness business processes. However, it consumes some of its business functions to facilitate Customer Order Handling.

SimpleOrder has the capability of reserving logical and network resources, depending upon the product ordered.

SimpleOrder provides a flexible, interactive product configuration mechanism that allows a user to interactively configure products and services. It configures bundles that comprise products and services selected from different or same line of business having multiple choices for selecting values for product attributes with flexible pricing.

SimpleOrder along with the WCC solution, has mechanisms in place to uniquely create a customer identity in the system. This identity is created by allocating a unique customer identity and authentication information in the customer domain. Once the customer identity is established, the customer demography and contact details are maintained in the WCC. In case the customer ceases to exist, the records are maintained for potential re-establishment of customer relationship. The WCC solution of SimpleOrder supports ‘Build Customer Insight’ by maintaining customer profiles and other relevant information.

Order handling

The order handling processes are responsible for accepting and processing the customer orders. They deal with pre-order feasibility determination, credit authorization, order status tracking, and customer updates on order activities. These processes also capture the customer's credit details and can interface with external applications for credit authorization.

SimpleOrder order handling processes:

• Track the pending orders and products and services for an existing customer.
• Request and confirm a scheduled due date for service activation from the downstream application.
• Track the order fulfillment status and provide service interfaces to capture status transition.
• Support the Add, Change, Move, or Cancel operations for a Customer Order.

SimpleOrder has the ability to capture service order completion status from a downstream order manager application, and to update customer order status as 'Completed' via its Order Capture service. Once a feasibility assessment and completeness check of the future configuration is done, and the customer has confirmed the to-be configuration, the order capture flow moves on to other details like billing and shipping information.

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Product and Offer Development and Retirement

The WebSphere Product Center (WPC) solution allows the development of detailed product specifications. These specifications include commercial specifications, product characteristics, product offering rules, and resource requirements associated with the product. SimpleOrder acts as a consumer to the WPC solution and its meta-model.

SimpleOrder supports addition of products, features, and enhancements based on the updates received from the WPC product catalog. General product availability and bundling of packages are achieved through the Product Eligibility and Product Configuration interfaces.

The product updates that SimpleOrder receives from WPC include changes in product specifications, new product launches, product termination and grandfathering, and new configuration rules. The data changes in WPC are propagated/replicated to the Selectica Configurator that is used in the SimpleOrder solution.