Claire is a Senior Business Analyst, who has vast knowledge about SimpleOrders' Ordering Channel Interfaces. This is what she has to say about these interfaces:
Currently, SimpleOrder supports browser-based channel interfaces for call centers, CSRs, and Blackberry users. The ordering interfaces are built on top of the SimpleOrder presentation layer. The SimpleOrder presentation layer has been developed using MVC (Model-View-Controller) design principles.
The controller layer of SimpleOrder implements various Action Servlets and Request Processors, using java beans, which interact with the Model layer. The presentation tier of SimpleOrder interacts back and forth with the Application Logic Layer, and works as a rendering engine for ordering channel interfaces.
Jeff has been working on the architecture of SimpleOrder. Let's take a look at what he has to say about SPM:
The SPM component provides SimpleOrder with all the rules for configuring and creating the product portion of the order. This component allows SimpleOrder to take in the various customer parameters such as customer profile data, service availability data, and credit data. Based on these parameters it presents products that can be sold to the customer. It uses a constraint engine (constraint rules) in order to filter a set of products stored in a product cache, before it is presented to the user. Once the products are presented, the customer can configure the various product combinations.
Another function of SPM is to provide the necessary details about the product characteristics to the presentation layer for configuration. SPM also supports product-mapping functions that help in rendering mapping from legacy to natural language and vice versa. SPM contains product information and intelligence, while the presentation layer by design contains no business intelligence. Therefore, the SPM guides the application layer in the rendering of information. In SimpleOrder, the channel applications interact with SPM to find out the available products based on eligibility criteria.
The SimpleOrder Channel Enablement applications include:
Susan has been researching on the KBS application. Here is what she has to say about it:
KBS is a collection of models that defines the configuration of a set of products or product features. It consists of models, parameters, and constraints. It is a flat file with extension .kbs. Every KBS has only one principal model, labeled “Main”. A Main model usually contains multiple sub-models. Any sub-model can refer to the parameters defined in the Main model by its label “Main”, regardless of the depth of the sub-model in the hierarchy.
There are two ways to create and maintain a KBS. These are:
Selectica servers (Selectica Configurator and Selectica Manager) serve the KBS with client services (product configuration, product availability, product eligibility) through a set of Selectica APIs which are defined in Selectica ADK (Application Development Kit). The ADK API’s used in SimpleOrder are the Java APIs.
John, another senior Business Analyst, has been working on SimpleOrder extensively. Let's take a look at what he has to say about MRE.
Typically in an organization, there could be a situation where a large number of products exist with exception rule patterns. It then becomes difficult to address such an extensive product catalog at the organization level.
To address this situation, the functional architecture of SimpleOrder provides a component called MRE. This component complements the product catalog and supports products/services and associated rules, which are otherwise difficult to model around the WPC solution.
Here are four Business Analysts who have an in-depth knowledge about these applications.
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