• It provides a 360-degree view to manage customer contacts and contracts information and provides customer-specific display of products and features, based on location, present configuration and service availability.
• It provides a single point to capture and process an order for every product in combination with any other product on a single Customer Order.
• It has in-built solution capabilities to provide a federated view of customer data from multiple customer data source. It supports multiple ordering channels (call center, RIM interfaces for Blackberry users are supported currently) that are built on top of common architecture layers to facilitate realizing uniform customer experience across channels.

Rule Driven Product Configuration

SimpleOrder implements rule-based product configuration solutions. The rule is based on the design that SimpleOrder implements are essentially driven by business constraints. These business constraints correspond to product availability, customer eligibility of products and services, customer profiles, products offers and services that can be made available to specific ordering channel. There are other types of constraints that are decided dynamically as customer progresses with negotiations and selections. (For example: customer configuring a bundle must conform to the rule of selecting minimum number of products and services). Wireline Voice Service may be added when the customer selects DSL Internet service.

• SimpleOrder product catalogue is built on top of Channel and Line Of Business agnostic solutions and provides converged customer interaction capability across lines of business and functional areas.
• SimpleOrder product configuration solution allows customers to negotiate and configure product bundlings comprising products and services from multiple lines of business (For example: Customer can select Wireline Telephony from Voice services, HSDS (High-Speed Data Service)/DSL from Internet Line Of Business, IPTV Services along with TV Programming services from Video Line Of Business).
• SimpleOrder solution enables uniform customer view of products and services while accessing via multi-channel ordering interfaces (for example, self-service, retail, pervasive devices like Blackberry and PDA).
• SimpleOrder solution helps service providers/operators realize single customer order across the enterprise.

The diagram below depicts the SimpleOrder solution stack with ordering channel interfaces built on top of order handling. The order handling is built on top of product domain (Product Catalogue) on one side and customer domain on the other. The diagram depicts how SimpleOrder achieves convergence both at customer level and products/services level.

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Real Time Interactive Validation of Customer Order

SimpleOrder validates the key components upfront during the order-handling process. By implementing pre-order validations, SimpleOrder helps prevent inaccurate customer orders and achieves large degree of flow-through. Currently, SimpleOrder validates the following business functions:

• Service Address Validation: SimpleOrder ensures that the customer service address is a valid location in terms of product and services that can be made available to that service address.
• Resource Availability: SimpleOrder integrates to the resource manager application to ensure network resources and necessary resource parameters (for example, synch rate for DSL and IPTV services) can be made available to the service address.
• Customer Eligibility and Product Configuration: SimpleOrder implements very stringent qualification rules for customer subscription to specific products and services. Qualification rules are based on customer profile, ordering channel and location. Apart from customer qualifications, SimpleOrder solution also takes product interdependence (product inclusion/exclusion configurations) into account to decide customer eligibility for products and services. SimpleOrder further provides configuration sessions, where customers can interactively select products and services from various lines of business and in various combinations (proposed configuration). SimpleOrder automatically runs a completeness check on the To-Be configuration.
• Service Activation Due Date: SimpleOrder integrates to Work Force management application and requests for the activation due date (request for service date) for the customer order.

Translated View of Product and Services

SimpleOrder, for its ordering channel interfaces, displays and captures products and their attributes by their generic enterprise definition i.e., customer language (product short names). SimpleOrder implements a solution that is used to translate generic product definition to that of downstream/legacy interpretation of product and services and vice versa (forward and backward translation). For each of the products and product attributes, product translation determines corresponding legacy product code types and values, if any (Example: product short names are translated to appropriate USOC codes).

Consistent View of Customer Order

SimpleOrder provides ordering channel interfaces to create and retrieve a customer order over different sales channels with a consistent view. Ordering channel interfaces are built on top of Order Capture Service. This service has the capabilities to capture a customer order initiated from one sales channel, and present it to another sales channel in a consistent and channel independent way for viewing and/or modifying. This feature provides a powerful cross-channel customer experience and support order entry across multiple channels.

SOA Enablement

SimpleOrder conforms to the SOA architecture principals. SimpleOrder implements business services that are based upon open standard WSDL definition and realized via Web services at transport level. SimpleOrder also implements business services that are built on top of a SOA framework (i.e. a common meta-model of SOA). This SOA framework integrates with actual providers (packaged applications, custom applications at the back end) via technology adapters (for example Web service adapters). This means, the service provider and service consumer contractual agreement remains unaffected with the replacement of back-end application components.

Example 1: SimpleOrder provides ‘product availability’ and ‘product configuration services’ that work in conjunction with WPC.

Example 2: SimpleOrder provides ‘product availability’ and ‘product configuration’ services that are consumed over multiple ordering channels (e.g. call center interfaces and blackberry interfaces uses the same business services. Similarly, customer orders captured via different ordering channels use the same ‘order submission’ service to submit a customer order).

In this release of SimpleOrder, interactions between the different components are based on SOA principles.