Orders

Orders are used to group orderlines (lines) together and to define what the customer is ordering in a contract. Orders are made up by two separate objects, DBO.LINEORDER and DBO.LINEINFO these are represented by the order and the orderliness respectively. The order contains some key information about that specific ordering, such as; the seller, the orderer, the ordering date, reference fields, contact information, source system and delivery system. A single delivery to a location is normally represented by a single order. Some customers however order very large projects at once, in those cases a compound order can be created. Compound order don’t normally have any lines they just contain orders for each location, these then contain the lines themselves.

There are no limits on: how many orders a customer can have, how many lines an order can have or how many orders a compound order can have.

Orders have new lines, old lines, or new and old lines. These different combinations create different types of orders, namely new sale, termination and change orders. This is a key part of how a customers connection changes over time, and example of this is shown in a later slide.

Orders are used to manipulate the set of lines they contain, such as changing the status from delivery ongoing to Finished. This change of status is controlled with TRANSITIONS in Telefakt, new TRANSITIONS can be added to allow different flows of the order through the different statuses.

It is important to note the difference between a order and its lines. When the order is completed nothing more will happen with that order, it is fulfilled, but its lines have just started. They will now be billed and in the future they will probably be changed by a change order. When that order is fulfilled a new set of lines replaces the initial set and the initial set becomes terminated. In this regard the Telefakt order and lines model is almost identical to the TmForum order model

Order lines

A order consists of one or more order lines, it is the order lines that define the service the customer is buying. They determine when the service is ready, when it should be stopped, what it is, how much it costs, where it is, how it should be invoiced and more.

Some of these attributes can be changed on the line directly, such as when it should start and stop and its status, whereas other items such as the price require a change order to be modified.