Meet Industries Order Management Decomposition
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe what Industries Order Management (OM) decomposition is and how it solves business challenges.
- Explain the benefits of order decomposition.
Before You Start
Before you start this module, make sure you complete the following content. The work you do here builds on the concepts and work you do in that content.
Also, consider completing the following recommended content.
Order Management Decomposition
Greg Cappelli is the fulfillment designer at Infiwave, a communications service provider (CSP) that sells communications equipment and services to businesses and consumers. Fulfillment designers play a key role in everything that happens after the customer submits an order.
Infiwave is busy digitally transforming its business by implementing Industries Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ), Industries Shared Catalog, and Enterprise Product Catalog (EPC). Industries OM is the final piece to the puzzle in Infiwave’s digital transformation journey.
Greg and the rest of the implementation team are excited to deploy Industries OM. Soon, Industries OM will take its rightful place alongside the Industries Shared Catalog and Industries CPQ in the Communications Cloud Solutions map.
Infiwave wants to move away from on-premise legacy systems and siloed architecture stacks. The CSP wants to:
- Know its customers, and deliver personalized offers and experiences.
- Quickly launch converged service offers.
- Capture accurate quotes and orders.
- Orchestrate timely order fulfillment.
To deliver timely order fulfillment, Infiwave needs Industries OM. Industries OM works with Industries CPQ to deliver orders with a catalog-driven approach. It fulfills orders by dividing them into their components through decomposition. Then it orchestrates the components across relevant systems to fulfill the order.
Now that you know how Industries OM works, it’s time to test your knowledge. All the best!
Order Fulfillment with Decomposition
After a customer submits an order, Industries OM first decomposes it. But what does that mean exactly?
Consider a typical Infiwave customer who orders broadband internet to watch cute cat videos at home. When they shop for broadband services, they browse through several offers. Each offer has different entertainment channels, internet speeds, and equipment. Customers find it easier to select the offer instead of individual products and services in that offer.
The first step for the product marketing team is to translate offers into something the company can deliver.
Telecommunication products and services can be complicated. It’s good for everyone involved if there’s a separation between commercial products that customers see and buy, and the technical products used to fulfill an order. Decomposition is the process that converts commercial products in an order into technical products.
Benefits of Order Decomposition
Order decomposition offers two key benefits.
Hidden Technical Complexities
Decomposition works behind the scenes to effectively shield technical details from customers and nontechnical staff, such as customer service representatives (CSRs) and business users. For most business users, decomposition is invisible both at run time and at design time. Why? Because at run time, the order is automatically decomposed when submitted from the Industries CPQ Cart. And, at design time, technical users such as fulfillment designers configure the decomposition processes. So, for everyone else, it just works like magic!
Both run-time and design-time decompositions are largely unseen to business users, thanks to Salesforce handling all the technical heavy lifting. To fully utilize decomposition, it’s important for business users to understand the basics of decomposition and its importance in order fulfillment.
While in the break room, Greg considers his favorite restaurant to understand how Infiwave uses decomposition to separate what it sells from how it fulfills what it sells. When he orders spaghetti at the restaurant, the waiter simply takes the order and the chef makes the meal. There’s no need to ask Greg an endless list of questions, especially when he’s hungry.
The technical aspects of order fulfillment are similar. When Infiwave customers order a home internet package, they evaluate the package based on bandwidth and data limits, but they don’t think too much about the technical requirements behind those choices. Plus, Infiwave CSRs wouldn’t want to risk losing sales by asking customers too many technical questions.
Simplified Catalog Maintenance
Decomposition also helps to overcome another challenge CSPs face in fulfilling orders: catalog maintenance.
Again, it all starts with the Industries Shared Catalog. Salesforce Industries best-in-class applications including our CRM, Industries CPQ, and Industries OM are in a single ecosystem driven by a shared, centralized catalog. Without decomposition, the catalog quickly expands and gets complicated. Complicated catalogs are costly and difficult to maintain.
Consider a simple example with Infiwave’s smartphones to understand the point—first without decomposition, then with decomposition. For every smartphone model that Infiwave offers, a sequence of tasks—called an orchestration plan—must be added to the catalog and executed when the order is placed.
It would be great if a single orchestration plan is reused for all of the Infiwave phones. Industries OM decomposition to the rescue! With decomposition, all phone orders funnel into a single decomposition relationship, which results in one orchestration plan. And the same plan can be used for all Infiwave models.
Order fulfillment for Infiwave smartphone consists of these steps.
- Customer submits an order for one or more Infiwave phones.
- CPQ submits the order to Industries OM.
- Decomposition maps each of the commercial phones to technical information.
- The technical information is used to fulfill, or orchestrate, the order for all of the phones.
When Infiwave retires an old model or adds new models, it doesn’t create or alter an orchestration plan. Decomposition changes are minimal and manageable, and they provide flexibility in defining commercial products.
A smaller, simpler catalog that requires less maintenance results in quicker time to market (TTM) and increased revenues. As part of the order fulfillment process, decomposition is a solution that scales. Business-to-business (B2B)? Business-to-consumer (B2C)? Hundreds or thousands of commercial products? Not a problem for Industries OM teamed up with Industries Shared Catalog and Industries CPQ. Industries OM can play an even bigger role with more complex products, services, and bundled offers.
What’s Next
In this unit, you learned about the basics of Industries OM’s decomposition process and the business benefits it brings. And there's a lot more to learn. Next, you delve deeper into decomposition and see another practical example to help solidify some fairly technical concepts.