Order fulfillment or order management is the complete process that covers the entire product lifecycle from the point when a sale takes place all the way through the delivery to the customer.
It is the most critical business process for digital service providers as well as ecommerce businesses.
ZebrineX has accumulated extensive experience with traditional as well as catalog-driven order management.
Catalog-driven order management differs from traditional one in that the business logic required to fulfill orders resides entirely in an external standardized catalog.
Usually a catalog-driven order fulfillment approach relies on a generic ordering engine. It must be capable of reading product specifications from the product catalog and decomposing orders into sub-orders (and tasks) accordingly.
It will also handle dependencies, so it will orchestrate order fulfillment in the right sequence, applying the right steps and conditions, which are also specified in the product catalog.
On the contrary, traditional order fulfillment often has complex and highly customized business logic which is difficult to be standardized or generalized.
This creates problems for fast introduction of new products and services or changing existing ones.
The concept of a catalog-driven order fulfillment is extensively discussed in the TM forum. It is much more flexible and is desirable than the traditional one. It provides us with the ability to innovate more quickly, cut down costs, reduce time to market as well as to increase customer experience.
There are many software vendors that claim they offer a true catalog-driven order management. We work with TIBCO Order Management: https://www.tibco.com/resources/datasheet/tibco-order-management
