Manage Orders
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe order management.
- Discuss the role of Dynamic Revenue Orchestrator in order fulfillment.
Order Management Steps
So far, you've learned about setting up the product catalog and pricing your products so that users can search for, select, and configure the products to their liking. Next comes placing the order.
In this unit, you explore what happens during order processing and fulfillment, which happen after an order is placed.
Dynamic Revenue Orchestrator drives the entire product-fulfillment journey, right from order creation, all the way to the customer receiving products. This, by the way, is called order fulfillment. Order fulfillment with Dynamic Revenue Orchestrator is a multistep process, including order decomposition and order orchestration. Order decomposition breaks down the order into technical products and services. Order orchestration divides the order-fulfillment process into smaller steps.
Order Decomposition
From an order-fulfillment lens, you can classify products into commercial and technical products. Commercial products are those displayed in the catalog for customers to select. Technical products, on the other hand, aren’t visible to the customer, even though they’re held in the catalog. These product types separate what the customer sees and what the back-end team responsible for order execution sees.
Order decomposition converts commercial products into technical products to aid order fulfillment. For example, consider a product called Electric Generator. In the product catalog, it’s defined as a commercial product. Product designers might set up a product bundle that includes maintenance and warranty packages, again commercial products, to complement the generator. Customers find the product bundle while browsing through the catalog and then add it to a quote, configure it, and place an order.
Processing this order means more than just sending the generator to the customer’s premises. A product designer or fulfillment designer must have worked with various stakeholders to understand what’s required to install a generator at the customer’s premises and to register the associated warranty and maintenance package. Based on this understanding, they define the technical products in the catalog, their decomposition relationships, and the orchestration entities to fulfill the order. In this scenario, Generator Installation is a technical product.
Order Orchestration
For easy order fulfillment, you break the order down into smaller steps and create an orchestration plan. In the generator example, the steps include procuring the generator and related equipment, dispatching it, receiving delivery confirmation, installing the generator, and activating the maintenance and warranty. In a nutshell, the technical product information is used to fulfill the order.
The table defines the types of steps available for your orchestration plan.
Step Type |
Definition |
Example |
|---|---|---|
Manual task |
Use it when you need user input or manual enrichment of data during the fulfillment process. Manual tasks can be assigned to a particular user. A default task is created and is associated with the fulfillment step. |
Installation is an example of a manual task that is done independently. The installer has to report back when the installation is complete. |
Callout |
Use it to make a call-out to a third-party system to perform some tasks. |
For example, if an external vendor supplies a certain part of the generator, such as the alternator, you can design ‘Procure Alternator’ in the orchestration plan. This makes a call-out to another application that notifies the vendor to make the alternator available and update the procurement status back to the orchestration plan. |
Auto task |
Uses Salesforce Flow to process internal data. |
For example, when you need a work order to be automatically created during the fulfillment process. When you configure an auto task, you specify the flow name to execute and provide order information as input. |
Milestone |
Use it to create a marker step in the fulfillment process to track all dependencies. |
When the installation is complete, you can mark the milestone task as complete. It's easier to track 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. |
For example, if you want to pause the order fulfillment until a work order is completed, you can define a step as pause. |
The screen shows the design of a sample Orchestration plan for the generator.
The plan includes the various steps involved in fulfilling the order. Each step reveals the step type—manual, auto task, callout, or pause. The steps run in the defined sequence, and at runtime, the user responsible for fulfillment marks the tasks complete as they are performed.
Behind the Scenes of Order Management
Let's now explore what happens when an order is submitted.
Typically, after the customer has accepted a quote, a sales rep submits the order for fulfillment and provisioning. To ensure that the orders are submitted to Dynamic Revenue Orchestrator, create a record-triggered automated flow and set the conditions for the flow execution to happen, for example, when an order status changes to Activated.
To learn more about creating a flow for order submission, see Order Submission for Fulfillment in Salesforce Help.
If you look at the Dynamic Revenue Orchestrator Context Definition Settings page, you can see that two context definitions are used-SalesTransactionContext and FulfillmentAssetContext.
The SalesTransactionContext context definition provides the information about the customer’s order. It also contains information about the fulfillment line items. The FulfillmentAssetContext is used for order decomposition and is mapped to the asset-related entities in the database.
As you’ve seen, during order decomposition, the commercial products decompose into technical products that are then used by the orchestration workflow. Product Fulfillment Decomposition Rules are used to determine the relationship between technical and commercial products.
In addition, product fulfillment scenarios and fulfillment step definitions also use dynamic rules.
Now that the orders are processed, it’s time for invoices. In the next unit, you learn about how invoices are generated and processed in Revenue Cloud.