About Task Compensation

Compensation refers to the changes OSM makes to an order when a customer requests a change to the order after the service fulfillment process has been initiated. OSM manages these in-flight changes, called order amendments, by analyzing the tasks performed in the process and determining whether data has changed. This analysis, called Order Change Management, is necessary when, for example:

A consumer orders high-speed internet access, then calls back midway through the service fulfillment process to change bandwidth or cancel the order.
A business customer orders VoIP service for several office locations and then calls back multiple times to change the feature sets for the various offices as the order is being processed.

In Design Studio, you configure the manner in which OSM manages these changes to in-flight orders by indicating how the run-time environment compensates the task if it is affected by an amendment.

Note:

Compensation ignores timer delays and event delays between tasks while undoing or redoing the tasks in a process.

Execution Modes

Tasks can execute in one of three possible execution modes:

Do is the default mode for a task that executes under normal processing.
Undo reverses the effects of the associated Do operation.
Redo combines both Undo and Do operations in a single operation.

On the Compensation Strategy tab of the Task editor, you define how the run-time environment compensates tasks if they are affected by an amendment. Each section on this tab represents a scenario to consider when determining a compensation strategy for the task.

You can model a static compensation strategy from the predefined list or a dynamic compensation strategy based on an XQuery expression that compares data from the revision order with the results of a comparison between the current order perspective and the historical order perspective. Dynamic compensation strategies can be useful if you want to model different compensation types based on revision order data values. For example, you could model the XQuery to select an Undo then do compensation strategy if the revision order bandwidth parameter is greater than 50 MB, and only a Redo compensation strategy if the bandwidth parameter is less than 50 MB.

For more information about dynamic compensation strategy XQuery expressions, see "Task Compensation Strategy XQuery Expressions".

Note:

If you modify the default strategy settings, ensure that you analyze the task within the context of the entire workflow because modifying strategy settings in one task can adversely effect subsequent tasks and task data.