Generic Contract business object

The generic Contract business object contains information about the operating terms and conditions between two entities. Customer Interaction Management (CIM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications use this business object to synchronize the service and support agreements that their global company establishes.

The generic Contract business object includes attributes that contain pricing information at the header and line level for gross and net total price, discounts, total tax and total net amount. It does not contain the individual pricing conditions that make up each of these totals. For example, if an application applies two discounts to a line item, the generic business object contains the total of both discounts.

The generic Contract business object includes data for top level parts only; that is, it does not explode the Bill of Material (BOM). For example, if the contract references an item called Computer that is made up of other items such as Monitor, Mouse, and CPU, the generic business object handles only Computer. To synchronize information about Monitor, Mouse, and CPU, the source application's adapter must generate separate generic Contract business objects for each one. The generic business object does not support BOMs.

Usage of this business object assumes that both the unit of measure and currency on unit price and unit cost stays the same between the CIM system and the ERP system.

Business object structure

The Contract business object references two child business objects:

Because a contract can have many line items and many contacts, the generic Contract business object has a zero-to-many relationship to its child objects.

The generic ContractLine business object, in turn, references three generic child business objects:

Because every line in a contract can have many contacts, the generic ContractLine business object references the generic ContractContactRef business object to access the contacts associated with the contract line. An attribute of the ContractContactRef business object contains the identifier of an associated generic Contact business object. The zero-to-many relationship between the ContractLine and ContractContactRef business objects allows access to every contact for each contract line.

Because every line in a contract can have many shipped products, the generic ContractLine business object references the generic ShippedProductRef business object to access the shipped products associated with the contract line. An attribute of the ShippedProductRef business object contains the identifier of an associated generic ShippedProduct business object. The zero-to-many relationship between the ContractLine and ShippedProductRef business objects allows access to every shipped product for each contract line. The ShippedProductRef business object also contains attributes that provide information on the shipped Item's serial number and installation date.

Because every line in a contract can have many characteristics, the zero-to-many relationship between the ContractLine and CharacteristicRef business objects allows access to every characteristic for each contract line.

Supported verbs

The generic Contract business object supports the following verbs:

Examining the object

To examine the attributes of the generic Contract business object or any of its children, use the System Manager or the Process Designer Express.

Related Reference

Copyright IBM Corp. 1997, 2004