Discover Order Decomposition
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Define order decomposition.
- Describe decomposition relationships in Dynamic Revenue Orchestrator.
Why Decomposition Matters
When a customer places an order, they expect a seamless experience, from product selection to delivery. And behind the scenes, businesses must break down orders into structured fulfillment tasks.
At SmartBytes, customers often purchase product bundles, like a package with a laptop, a preinstalled antivirus license, and an extended warranty. While the customer sees a single product, fulfilling the order requires different systems to perform multiple steps, including:
- Ship the laptop from inventory.
- Activate the antivirus software licensing.
- Register the warranty.
To manage this complexity, Dynamic Revenue Orchestrator (DRO) uses order decomposition to break down orders into structured fulfillment requests.
Order Decomposition Defined
Order decomposition is the process of breaking down an order into different parts for easier execution and tracking. To make sense of the process, it’s important to distinguish between commercial products and technical products.
A commercial product is any product that a customer can find in a product catalog. Consider a laptop bundle, which is a commercial product. A technical product, though available in the product catalog, is generally not visible to the customer. But technical products play an important role in order fulfillment. They are defined taking into consideration the requirements of the downstream systems, such as billing, fulfillment, logistics, and other systems involved in the fulfillment process. Some examples of technical products are license activation and laptop assembly. In a nutshell, commercial products are what a customer sees and technical products are what’s under the covers.
Decomposition segregates a commercial order into technical tasks, like laptop assembly or product-license activation. Technical products are essentially tasks that have to be completed before the order is fulfilled. So, at the end of decomposition, DRO issues those tasks as fulfillment requests to the next stage: orchestration. Remember, the customer doesn’t even have to think about this as it happens in the background.
Order decomposition enriches commercial orders with the technical input needed for order fulfillment. Then, based on customer needs, order decomposition generates a series of fulfillment requests or suborders. These fulfillment requests move to downstream fulfillment systems.
Doesn’t it seem like a lot of work, just for a simple order? You may be wondering if a single computer monitor has to go through the whole decomposition process. Thank goodness, it doesn’t. Simple orders can be orchestrated without decomposition. Decomposition is necessary when the product catalog has a large number of products and the business wants to decouple front-office and back-office processes.
Benefits of Order Decomposition
Order decomposition hides technical details from customers and other business users. For example, customers buying a laptop bundle order a product based on their needs. They don’t need to know about things like license activation for pre-installed software on the laptop. Customers just want a fully functioning product.
Revenue Cloud components share a centralized product catalog. Catalogs can quickly expand and get complicated if they aren’t organized well. Complicated catalogs are costly and hard to maintain. For example, SmartBytes sells many smartphone models, with each model using a similar fulfillment process. Without organizing the catalog, SmartBytes would need a separate fulfillment plan for each phone model. But with the right organization, a single fulfillment plan can support all models, reducing catalog maintenance.
Explore Decomposition Rules
Product Fulfillment Decomposition Rules control how products or product classifications break down into technical products.
When you define a product fulfillment decomposition rule, you set the source product or product classification and the destination product. Then you map similar fields and attributes of the source and destination products. DRO uses this mapping to send order data to the fulfillment system.
In this example, the product attributes of the commercial Retail POS product map to the target attributes of the Activation Service technical product.
Using product fulfillment decomposition rules, you can also configure rules and conditions that execute when an order is submitted and generate fulfillment orders and fulfillment line items. In short, using order decomposition fulfillment designers can hide the complexity of commercial products from technical products.
So far, you’ve discovered how DRO simplifies complex orders using decomposition. In the next unit, learn how the solution executes orders in the right sequence, and at the right point in time.