Product Specification Field Decomposition

Each product has a modeled set of characteristics within a product catalog. When a product is decomposed to a plan item, the default and the instance characteristics are copied over into the User-Defined Fields (UDFs) of every plan item. Through this, the information is reused later when the plan item is run.

For example, consider a product "Line Access 5MB" has characteristics modeled such as Speed=5, QOS=4, IPAccess=false. These are all modeled as instance variables. When an order is submitted for Line Access or is part of a bundle, the plan item uses the same instance characteristics copied as User-Defined Fields into the plan item. When the plan item is run, the User-Defined Fields can be passed to the service call.

When an order is made the characteristics are visible as user-defined fields for each order line. When you submit the order, the user-defined fields are converted into user-defined fields for the new plan items and if the order line is a bundle then those items can have user-defined fields as well, which are copied to the execution plan. All these user-defined fields can be used later through the service call.