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Integration Strategy for Order Management

If you integrate Siebel Business Applications with back-office, accounting, and other applications, then you will need to develop an integration strategy. The integration tasks you must consider depend on the business needs of your company. Some tasks you may want to consider are in the following list.

NOTE:  You can integrate some functionality using Oracle Application Integration Architecture (AIA), which does not require using the strategy outlined here. For more information, see Process of Integrating Order to Cash and Integrating Distributed Order Orchestration.

• Determine the application of record for each of the key data elements. Some of the data elements you must consider are:
  • Item masters (product)
  • Configuration and pricing rules
  • Customer master
• Decide how to replicate data. You can either replicate data between your Siebel Business Application and your back office application using batch replication at regular intervals (typically daily), or use real-time replication.

  If you use real-time replication, then you must define a triggering event that causes data to be replicated on both applications. For example, you might define the triggering event to be a transaction such as entering a new customer or a new product. Then the replication would occur when the transaction is submitted.

  Alternatively, you might add a button to an applet that runs a workflow that triggers replication. Because Siebel Business Applications save data when the user steps off the record, the event you define is not necessarily tied to when data is written to the database.

• Define the points in your business process when you want to update information across applications. You identify points in the business process when you must use ASIs to update information between your Siebel Business Application and your back-office or a third-party application. For example, when the status of an order is updated in a back-office application, you might want the order status in your Siebel Business Application to be updated automatically.

  If an end user of the Siebel Business Application performs a query while accessing a new order, then you could have the back-office application update the Siebel order in real-time. If your back-office application has the capability to do this update, then you can implement it using the Update Siebel Order ASI. However, if it is not feasible for your back-office application to provide this update in real-time, then the end user can click a Get Status button on the user interface to request the updated order information.