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About Order Management

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Siebel Order Management allows employees such as salespeople and call center agents to create and manage quotes and orders through their entire lifecycle. Siebel Order Management can be tightly integrated with back-office systems, allowing users to perform tasks such as checking credit and confirming availability, as well as monitoring the fulfillment process.

Asset-based ordering allow quotes and orders to be created based on a customer's existing assets. Asset-based ordering is particularly useful in supporting companies whose product offerings include complex service products, such as phone services and equipment.

Siebel Order Management allows employees to:

Create quotes and orders for new products and services
Create quotes and orders to modify existing products and services
Modify in-process orders that have been submitted for fulfillment
Generate order information for submission to back office billing and fulfillment systems

The Order Management Lifecycle

The order management life cycle includes tasks that fall into several groups:

Preorder Tasks. Can include creating accounts, contacts, and opportunities or helping anonymous customers through the needs-analysis process.
Order Entry Tasks. Can include selecting products and services, capturing quotes and orders, verifying products and pricing, checking availability to promise, entering shipping, tax, and payment information, and performing a credit check.
Order Monitoring Tasks. Can include providing the customer with order status, notifying the customer that the order has shipped, creating supplemental orders, and monitoring or modifying activities that support the order, such as installation.

The order management lifecycle is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1.  Order Management Cycle

Business Scenario for Order Management

This scenario provides an example of how order management can be used. Your company may follow a different process according to its business requirements.

As your customers express interest in your products and services, you can keep track of that information and help them identify the appropriate solution. A salesperson can create an opportunity and record the best solution to meet the customer's needs.
Once the best solution is identified, you can provide a quote provided that details the products and their prices. A salesperson may convert an opportunity to a quote, or create a quote manually. Products and services can be customized so that the customer can specify exactly what options they are interested in and can see the associated prices.
Once a customer accepts a quote, it can be converted to an order. Alternatively, a salesperson may create an order directly, without creating a quote.
The salesperson can enter shipment information and check on the availability of the items. If an order contains a number of items, availability can be checked for each line item.
The salesperson can perform tasks such as calculating tax and shipping costs, verifying payment information, checking the customer's credit, and authorizing their use of a credit card.
The salesperson may perform final tasks such as attaching electronic documents to the order, such as a purchase order or a letter of credit, and generating service activities related to the order such as installation.
The salesperson submits the order.
If appropriate, the order can be routed for approval by a supervisor.
An acknowledgement of the order can automatically be sent to the customer by email.
If you are using asset-based ordering, when the order has been filled, the appropriate product line items become assets. Assets are associated with the customer's account and are a central part of the customer's service profile.
If you are using asset-based ordering, not all products in an order convert to assets. For example, when an order for telephone service is provisioned, installation is a line item of the phone service product, but it does not become an asset. You can specify what products will become trackable assets through the Product Administration screen.
If customers change their minds and want to revise an order before it has been fulfilled, the change can be handled by modifying unsubmitted orders or by creating supplemental orders that revise submitted orders.
As a customer's needs evolve over time, the customer may request additions and changes to the products and services they have. To make these changes, new quotes and orders can be based on the current items in the customer's profile. Requests for changes to existing services are called delta quotes or delta orders.

Although end users may start the order management process at a number of different screens and views, the underlying order management cycle is essentially the same.

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