Plan Development

During order plan development, Orchestrator calls out to Automated Order Plan Development to design the plan of action to fulfill an order. Automated Order Plan Development analyzes the order and the Product Catalog and determine what plan items must be executed and in what sequence to fulfill an Order.

Automated Order Plan Development looks at the product on an order line and determine one of the following scenarios:

  • The product is non-executing, in which case no plan item is required and the order line is marked as complete.
  • The product requires a single plan item. When this plan item completes then the order line is marked as complete.
  • The product requires multiple plan items to be executed in a defined sequence. The final plan item in the sequence is flagged as end-of-line (EOL). When this plan item completes then the order line is marked as complete.
  • The product has previously been provisioned. The plan item or items is created as above, but the status set immediately to complete. The order line is also marked as complete.
  • Plan item dependencies are determined by rules and the configuration of the product model hierarchy

The logical relationship between order, order lines, plan, and plan items is shown in the following diagram:

Order and Plan Logical Components

Order and Plan Logical Components

In this example, Automated Order Plan Development has analyzed the order and determined the following:

  1. Order Line 1 orders Product A. This product is fulfilled by Process Component EP_B1. This component has no dependencies so it begins execution immediately.
  2. Order Line 2 orders Product B. This is a non-executing product do there is no associated plan item and no execution occurs.
  3. Order Line 3 orders Product C. This product is fulfilled by two Process Components that execute in series EP_B2 followed by EP_B3. Component EP_B2 might only begin execution once EP_B1 completes, and component EP_B3 might only begin execution on EP_B2 completes.
  4. Order Line 4 orders Product D. This product is fulfilled by Process Component EP_B4. This component might only begin execution once EP_B1 completes.
  5. Order Line 5 orders Product E. This product is fulfilled by Process Component EP_B5. This component might only begin execution once both EP_B3 and EP_B4 complete.