Other Considerations

When you are designing your system architecture there are a number of general recommendations and best practices you should consider. These best practices cover end-to-end order tracking and ensure that you do not loose any data.

OrderRef

OrderRef, an external order ID, must be unique in all TIBCO Fulfillment Order Management orders. If you submit an order without a unique OrderRef, the order management system (OMS) does not treat it as a new order and attempts to amend the previous order.

If you are using a non-unique external ID to map to OrderRef or an external ID that you can use with different TIBCO Fulfillment Order Management orders, TIBCO recommends adding the external ID as a header UDF in the order.

Note: UDFs in the Order Management System have limited out-of-the-box search ability.

General Recommendations

It is important when you are designing your architecture to incorporate procedures that prevent order data loss. TIBCO recommends reviewing the following procedures before designing your architecture solution:

  • Ensure that your architecture solution includes end-to-end order tracking capability and visibility similar to that used in the order system of TIBCO Fulfillment Orchestration Suite.
  • Include recovery and repair capabilities in your design. For example, you need a plan for handling a situation when a fulfillment process call fails to connect to a back-end system. Having a plan in place prevents you from having to abort the order.
  • Determine the interfaces that operation needs to complete this work. Re-sending an order may not be a viable or reasonable option.
  • Include target group representatives when planning manual steps and activities.
  • Validate your error and exception handling approach with other representatives in the order processing chain from front-end solutions to back-end systems.
  • Ensure that your solution architecture accounts for the different capabilities in each system area. For example, a front-end system may not be able to resubmit an order once it is submitted, while a back-end system can receive order data again without considering it an amendment.