Siebel Order Management Guide Addendum for Industry Applications > Overview of Order Management > Basic Concepts of Order Management >

About Quotes and Orders

Siebel Order Management provides a number of enhancements to the basic quote and order functionality. For detailed information on Order Management processing of quotes and orders see Siebel Order Management Guide.

A quote is an offer to a customer for specific products and services at a specific price. Quotes can be generated by employee end users such as call center sales representatives, by customers using Siebel eSales, or by a channel partner. The quote may include products and services (configured to show the customer-selected attributes), any discounts by line item and by account, price per item, and the service and billing accounts for each item. If you have the Multiple Price Types option turned on, they may also detail one-time, recurring, and usage-based fees that will be incurred.

For customizable products, all levels in the product hierarchy are treated equally. Every level can have pricing, billing, and service accounts, a service asset, and attributes. This structure allows end users to create one quote that spans multiple service accounts and billing accounts. For example, when placing a quote for phone services that span multiple locations, you can identify individual service accounts, billing accounts, and agreement names for individual line items, as well as applying appropriate pricing discounts and other rules.

Active Quote

An end user session can have only one active quote at a time. Each item that is added to a quote for a customer is added to the active quote. The active quote is associated with one master account. (The master account is the primary, or parent, account. If you have set up separate billing and service accounts for a client, those accounts will be associated with a higher-level master account for the client.) A key value of an active quote is it avoids creating new quotes when you are working with the same customer. The active quote adds all quotes of services or products requested by one customer into one quote so that all quotes are together.

A quote becomes the active quote when:

• The employee end user creates a new quote by clicking the New, Modify, Disconnect, Suspend or Resume buttons in the Installed Assets, Billing Items or Customer Portal views.
• The employee end user navigates to the Quote Details view and clicks the Profile button.
• The customer end user goes to the shopping cart.

When an end user makes changes to the service profile of a different account, a different quote is made active. When a new quote is made active, the previously active quote becomes inactive by implication.

When a quote is converted to an order, the quote becomes inactive.

NOTE:  If the employee end user clicks New in the Customer Portal, Installed Assets, or Billing Items view, and there is already an active quote for the same account, the end user is taken to the existing active quote. An additional new quote is not created.

Active Order

An order becomes active only when the employee end user creates a new order by clicking the New, Modify, Disconnect, Suspend and Resume buttons in the Installed Assets, Billing Items or Customer Portal Views.

When an order is submitted, the order becomes inactive.

Quote-to-Sales Order

When a customer approves a quote and it becomes an order, an employee end user such as a CSR (Customer Service Representative) can automatically write the quote information into an order with the click of a button. When the end user clicks the Sales Order button or the Auto Order button, a workflow does the following:

• Generates a new sales order
• Converts all line items in a quote to order line items
• Explodes all quote line items, so that there multiple quantities of an item become individual line items

After a quote is converted to a sales order, the original quote still exists, and can be referenced. You will see the quote number in the order header.

NOTE:  All orders created from quotes are considered Sales Orders. These orders may include items that are physical products and items that are service products. Sales Orders should not be confused with Service Orders. Service Orders are created as a result of a service request and are managed as part of Siebel Field Service.

Multiple Open Orders

Multiple orders may be in progress for a particular customer or even a particular service item at any given time.

One benefit of having multiple open orders is that when a customer places an order and then reconsiders and requests different options before the order has been provisioned, both requests can be placed, tracked, and addressed appropriately.

From the end user's perspective, there are three ways to modify an order after it has been placed:

• Submit multiple orders against the same asset.
• Make a change to a previously submitted order.
• Create a follow-on order.

This is handled by two processes, Modify Order and Supplemental Order. Creating a supplemental order does not actually create an additional order; it revises an existing order.

For customer end users, multiple open orders appear as separate items in the My Orders view.

Supplemental Order

A supplemental order is created by revising an open order. A supplemental order overrides an order that has already been sent to the provisioning system, is still in process, and has not yet been provisioned. Supplemental orders are useful when a customer wants to make further changes to an order while it is in transit— that is, before its status is Complete in the provisioning system. A revised order submits an entirely new order, not the difference between the latest order and the prior order.

The following is an example of when a supplemental order can be useful.

A customer currently subscribes to DSL plan at a speed of 786K and now wants to change the speed associated with the plan to 1.1Mbps. In the Customer Portal view, Installed Assets list, the call center sales representative selects the plan, clicks Modify, and creates a quote for the change. With the customer's approval, the sales representative then converts the quote to an order and submits it. The order is then sent to a provisioning system. There is now an open order for this item.

An hour later, the customer calls again and wants to back out of the change. The call center representative (CCR) again goes to the Customer Portal. In the Orders list, the CCR drills down into the open order and reviews the order. On the order header the CCR selects Revise. This action increments the revision number on the Order Header. The employee selects the appropriate line item, makes a change during the configuration session that returns the DSL plan speed to the original 786K. The employee clicks Done to add the change and then submits the supplemental order. In this case, the change the end user submits is supplemental to the original order.

The order number of a supplemental order remains the same with a different version. A user will see multiple orders instances with the same order number and the most recent order instance is listed at the top of the order list.

NOTE:  Some provisioning systems do not support supplemental orders. Others only support a limited set of allowed changes. To support the widest possible set of provisioning systems, your Siebel application supports these types of changes to an order: Add, Delete, Update, and no change.

NOTE:  Supplemental orders are not implemented using Workflows and PMT Business Services, as are all the other order types supported. Supplemental Order was implemented using CSSBCBase user properties.

Ungroup and Explode

A line item with a quantity of more than one may be ungrouped to become multiple items, each with a quantity of one. This is required if each item has unique characteristics and therefore must be tracked separately with a unique integration ID. If the end user does not ungroup items during configuration, the quote-to-order process automatically ungroups them. This automatic ungrouping is referred to as exploding the items.

NOTE:  Ungrouping or exploding items occurs only when an item has the Auto Explode flag set. All other items remain as an order for a multiple quantity, without being ungrouped.

In addition to providing unique integration IDs, the Ungroup feature can simplify the process of creating complex orders. The following example shows how an end user can take advantage of the Ungroup feature to simplify a new bulk order.

The customer wants to order ten local lines, with similar configurations: five will have voice mail, five will have call waiting. The customer wants each of the ten lines to have the same four additional features. An employee end user can start by creating one line item—with the four features that are desired on each of them—and the quantity two. Then, the end user ungroups that item, so that there are two items. Next, the end user takes one of those items, adds voice mail to it, and changes the quantity to five. Then, the user takes the second line item, adds call waiting to it, and changes the quantity of it to five. Finally, the user ungroups both line items, so that there are ten individual line items.

Now each line item has a setting for an integration ID, which is assigned when the line items are created. In addition, each line item has a field for Service ID. Depending on the implementation of the Siebel applications with the back end systems, the employee end user in this example might click a button to populate the field with phone numbers from the asset management system, or a phone number might be assigned as part of the provisioning process.

NOTE:  The Ungroup process was not designed to ungroup large quantities.

Move Orders

Services can now be moved from one location to another. For example, if a customer is moving to a new location but wants to keep the same phone services and maintain the same phone numbers, the customer can do so by moving the service.

Behind the scenes, moving a service is handled by performing both disconnect and reconnect actions transparently for the user.

On the screen, the end user specifies the new location, a start date for the move-in address, and an end date for the move-out address.

NOTE:  This functionality is included in the employee application only. It does not appear in the customer application. For detail information on move processing, see Moving a Service to Another Location (End User).