Best Practices for Catalog Modeling
You should be aware of the best practices to use when creating a product model. You need to consider your product catalog design and how Fulfillment Catalog can play a role in your product modeling. You also need to consider how to manage the product life cycle.
Effective Product Modeling
The goal of creating a good product model is to identify correct process components and include the correct number and type of products to maximize reuse. TIBCO typically recommends using smaller catalogues because they improve system performance
TIBCO recommends modeling as few components as possible but as many as are needed.
Product Catalog Design
Designing a product is a delicate balance between a pure product model view versus a model that contains enough technical detail to ensure that you can create correct fulfillment plans for orders.
In a typical design process, a product manager enters an initial view of a product into the catalog and the engineer then adds additional technical artifacts to the model to ensure there is enough information to correctly drive the fulfillment of orders.
Occasionally, you need to add additional products to the catalogue which do not map to an actual TIBCO product. TIBCO refers to these products as "helper products," and you can add them to achieve a specific sequence of fulfillment actions or to ensure design principles are met.
TIBCO Fulfillment Catalog
TIBCO Fulfillment Catalog can play a role in your product modeling by functioning as:
- Master for product data
- User of master product data from one or more other systems or catalogues
- TIBCO Master Data Management solution, integrating with both masters and users of catalogue data
The complexity of the last two can increase as the number of systems grows.
Integrating TIBCO Fulfillment Catalog with Other Systems
You can integrate TIBCO Fulfillment Catalog with other systems; however, you should be aware of the level of automation with other systems and the catalogue model capabilities.
There are a number caveats to consider when using other systems with TIBCO Fulfillment Catalog. For example, other systems may require data that has no natural representation in TIBCO Fulfillment Catalog, including user interface related issues. You also need to consider the order in which you want to present the items and the arrangement of the order. For example, how do you arrange the order if a choice is required that impacts the order.
Additionally, other systems may impose restrictions on model structures for performance or management reasons rather than technical or capability reasons.
These issues may require you to define certain patterns and restrictions when you model items in TIBCO Fulfillment Catalog regardless of its underlying functionality.
TIBCO recommends verifying that the model you are using is compatible with the TIBCO Fulfillment Orchestration Suite release version.
Product Life Cycle Management
The following information lists the expected product life cycle management processes you may need to manage:
- Define new products and offerings.
- Validate and or tests new products and offerings.
- Approve new products and offerings.
- Act as decision maker for retiring or replacing a product.
- Build or connect the required fulfillment elements.
- Validate and or test the fulfillment elements.
- Approve the fulfillment elements.
- Deploy changes and determine how and when changes are deployed.
- Determine the dependencies for life cycle management in other integrated systems.
It is important to understand the consequences of the decisions you make during the life cycle process. The issues you may encounter during the life cycle process range from very fine to very granular and may include the following issues: