Explore Order Orchestration
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explain order orchestration.
- Identify fulfillment workspace and fulfillment steps.
- Describe SLA and Jeopardy Handling.
- Discuss Fallout Management.
Order Orchestration Overview
Order orchestration in Dynamic Revenue Orchestrator (DRO) automates and manages the fulfillment process, ensuring every step occurs in the right sequence. After order submission, orchestration coordinates all the tasks, from inventory checks to shipping and billing, until the product or service is successfully delivered.
Remember, you can orchestrate orders directly, without using order decomposition.
Orchestration also informs the customer service rep, so that they can check the order status. After decomposing the order into tasks, orchestration directs each task to the appropriate user or system for completion. For example, when a user runs a credit check, orchestration sends the task to the appropriate user for follow-up.
The diagram shows the high-level flow of an order through decomposition and orchestration.
After the order is submitted, it’s decomposed into commercial and technical components. Remember that simple orders can skip the decomposition stage. Next, the fulfillment lines are automatically created and fed into an orchestration plan.
By now, you know that the output of the decomposition process consists of fulfillment requests. Sometimes these requests are called “suborders”. DRO uses suborders to dynamically generate and execute an orchestration plan.
Orchestration Plans and Swimlanes
What does an orchestration plan look like? It’s similar to how you break down a complex task into smaller, easily achievable ones. You’d then group the tasks based on some similarity—all the tasks that you can do yourself are in one group and tasks that require external help go into another group.
The screen shows an orchestration plan with swimlanes and tasks that categorize activities based on the responsible system or team.
Using the order details, DRO generates orchestration plans that contain fulfillment steps neatly arranged in swimlanes. Typically, there’s a swim lane for each fulfillment system, such as inventory, shipping, and billing. Tasks in swimlanes can be dependent on each other. For example, a shipping swimlane includes a task to ship out a laptop that depends on another inventory task that pulls the laptop from inventory. The laptop can only be shipped if it’s available in inventory.
For fulfillment operators and other business users such as sales operations, an orchestration plan provides an end-to-end visual representation of all orchestration tasks. They can also see task prerequisites and whether they’re complete, pending, on hold, or in another status. Each step is color-coded based on its status and updated as the status changes.
Key Components of Fulfillment Workspace
The fulfillment workspace helps designers craft visual fulfillment scenarios. It’s where businesses create and manage orchestration plans for their products.
As a fulfillment designer, you configure these plans during new product launches, either by viewing and reusing existing configurations or creating new ones. You start by creating a fulfillment step group. Then, you add fulfillment step definitions that are generated by order decomposition, to the orchestration plan.
A fulfillment step definition includes, among other things, the step type, scope, and the run-as user. The scope defines how many times the step is created during order fulfillment—once per fulfillment plan, once per product bundle, or once per line item in the order. If the fulfillment step needs specific permissions to run, specify a username with sufficient permissions as the run-as user.
Step Type
Fulfillment steps are of various types depending on their function.
Step Type |
Description |
Example |
|---|---|---|
Auto Task |
Uses Salesforce Flows to process fulfillment steps. |
You might need to automatically create a work order using the appropriate Salesforce Flow. In this case, define the task as an Auto task. |
Callout |
Makes a call-out to a third-party system to perform some tasks. |
To ship an item in the order, you might need to make a callout to an external third-party system. To do this, define your fulfillment step as a callout type, and provide the required details of the shipping system. |
Manual Task |
To get user input or for manual enrichment of data during fulfillment. |
You can create a manual task for a product installation. After the installer completes the task, a fulfillment operator can mark the step as complete. |
Milestone |
To create marker steps in the fulfillment process to track all dependencies. |
Use Milestone tasks to create marker steps in the orchestration plan for easy tracking of major activities or a group of activities. |
Pause |
Use it to temporarily stop the execution of the orchestration plan and wait until a certain task is completed to resume the workflow. |
To pause the order fulfillment until a work order is completed, you can define a step as a pause step. |
To learn more about the various step types, see Fulfillment Step Types, in Salesforce Help.
Product Fulfillment Scenario
To simplify fulfillment for products frequently included in bundles, you can create product fulfillment scenarios to automate the addition of steps to a fulfillment plan. This way, you don’t have to create a new step every time. For example, for laptop bundles, fetching the laptop from the warehouse is a common fulfillment step. To cater for this situation, you define a product fulfillment scenario with a condition that when the laptop bundle is added to an order, DRO should add a step to fetch the laptop from the warehouse, to a fulfillment plan.
SLA and Jeopardy Handling
According to Murphy’s law, “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong,” and this applies to order fulfillment as well. To minimize potential issues, it’s best to be prepared and take the necessary steps. DRO helps businesses set service level agreements (SLAs) and jeopardy thresholds to monitor fulfillment steps and take corrective action when needed.
For effective SLA and jeopardy handling, you need to define how to determine if a task is successful or not. In DRO, you can set an estimated duration for a task, which acts as an SLA. If the task takes longer, it indicates a potential issue. Additionally, you can define a jeopardy threshold, which warns users when a task might fail. For example, if you specify an estimated duration of 24 hours and a jeopardy threshold of one hour for a step like License Activation, the system will flag the step as in jeopardy if it isn’t completed within 23 hours, enabling fulfillment operators to intervene and take action.
Order Fallout Handling
Even with SLA and Jeopardy settings in place, some fulfillment steps can fail. In order fulfillment terms, fallout has happened. Fallout means that an order has failed due to inadequate inventory, wrong information, a system error or another reason.
If order fallout happens, you can take one of two approaches.
-
Retry failed steps: Set the number of times DRO retries a failed step. After attempting the specified number of retries and the step still fails, it moves to a queue. Fulfillment operators can then resolve the issue and retry the step.
-
Mark the step as complete: In cases where a step can’t be retried, fulfillment operators can manually mark it as complete. For example, if a billing system is down, the operator can create a manual bill and mark this step as complete so that the remaining steps proceed.
By offering flexible resolution options, DRO ensures efficient fallout management, reducing order delays and improving overall fulfillment reliability.
Monitor Order Fulfillment
For fulfillment operators and sales operations specialists, it’s crucial to monitor order processing and make sure that fulfillment steps are running successfully. Fulfillment plans provide an at-a-glance view of the fulfillment steps, their dependencies, the state of each step, and their SLA status.
Click each numbered area to learn more.
At any point in the fulfillment process, the fulfillment plan displays the details for every fulfillment step in real time.
In this module, you learned how Dynamic Revenue Orchestrator enables order fulfillment in Revenue Cloud. You also discovered two important components of DRO—order decomposition and order orchestration.
Great job! You’re now ready to tame and transform your complex order-orchestration process into a harmonic symphony using Dynamic Revenue Orchestrator.