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

Auto Match

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Within certain limitations, the Auto Match business service allows Siebel eConfigurator to automatically match components in a quote, order, or asset with components in the current version of the product model. This capability is important when the product components in a quote, order, or asset were generated from an old version of a product model or when they were populated directly from an external system with different product models.

This can occur in a few different situations. For example:

After a software upgrade, such as upgrading from Siebel 6.x to Siebel 7.x, it may be necessary or desirable to regroup product components under different relationships in a customizable product.
During an upgrade, if existing product models are converted to newer product models, regrouping of product components may occur as part of the conversion.

In each of these situations, when product components are regrouped under different relationships, there will be conflicts between the new version of the customizable product and existing transaction data in quotes, orders, and assets. Depending on how the customizable products have changed, it may be possible to use Auto Match to help resolve such conflicts.

Here is a high-level summary of how Auto Match works: Before eConfigurator is launched, the order management workflows run Auto Match to ensure that the product instance from the quote, order or asset is compatible with the latest version of the customizable product definition. There are three relationship criteria Auto Match validates. It looks for a product that meets any of these criteria:

Has no component relationship foreign key
Has an invalid product relationship foreign key
No longer appears in a valid product relationship

If it finds a product component that fits any of these criteria then the Auto Match business service looks to see whether that product component belongs to a different relationship under the same parent component in the hierarchy. If it finds a valid relationship, the Auto Match business service updates the relationship foreign key of the product component in the in-memory product instance. If no valid relationship is found then the Auto Match business service generates a warning message and deletes the component from the product instance.

NOTE:  Auto Match is not enabled out-of-the-box in CME 7.5. To use this functionality you must update the order management workflows to call the Auto Match business service and handle the results.

For complete information about the Auto Match business service and how to implement it, see Technical Note 318 on SupportWeb.

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