Functions of the Fulfillment Provisioning Catalog

Fulfillment Provisioning Catalog operates on service order data supplied to it; conditioning and modifying the data to ensure that it correctly follows the process of fulfilling a service order. The types of processing that Fulfillment Provisioning Catalog performs include:

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Service order flow: Dynamically generates a service order flow for each service order. Product Order Processing executes the service order flow only after executing pending processing orders.

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Product order decomposition: Creates new product orders for each incoming product order as per configuration settings. The order of decomposition can be used for technical order sequencing.

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Data enrichment: Adds data to a product order to provide details related to the order.

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Optimization: Configures Fulfillment Provisioning Catalog using the subscriber context to discard product orders that are already provisioned for a subscriber.

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Sequencing: Rearranges product orders so that they run in the correct order. Fulfillment Provisioning Catalog may add, remove, or replace product orders as a part of this process.

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Attaching product order flows: Assigns an appropriate product order flow specification to each product order. In addition, the Fulfillment Provisioning Catalog specifies and sequences the tasks to execute the order.

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Multiple iteration: Retrieves data from external systems.

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Validation: Validates the data contained in service orders.

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Rollback: In case of an error in execution of the service order flow, generates a new service order flow to undo the successfully processed service orders.

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Authentication: Checks whether or not the requestor is a known user with valid credentials. If so, the catalog grants rights to create product orders and the rights to use incoming product orders.

The following figure provides a conceptual view of how Fulfillment Provisioning Catalog processes service order data.

Figure 32. Fulfillment Provisioning Catalog Processing Overview

In this example, note the following about the order data and the changes made by the Fulfillment Provisioning Catalog changes:

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The incoming service order has two product orders attached, each containing some parametric data.

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Fulfillment Provisioning Catalog:

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Adds new (technical) product orders that describe the provisioning of the original product orders.

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Adds various data needed for the new product orders.

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Attaches product order flow specifications to each of the new product orders.

Fulfillment Provisioning Catalog lets you design how to automatically configure the activation and provisioning of services.