Oracle Communications Order and Service Management (OSM) uses fulfillment patterns to describe the structure of a set of products. Many conceptual model products or OSM product specifications can map to the same fulfillment pattern, which enables you to introduce new products or product specifications without requiring new fulfillment patterns in Oracle Communications Design Studio. Additionally, you can create base specifications that you reuse and extend to reduce the amount of modeling necessary to represent the types of products supported in your product catalog.
OSM must determine the fulfillment pattern for every order item on an incoming order. OSM acquires the fulfillment pattern from the property on the order item that is specified in the Fulfillment Pattern Mapping field in the Property Mapping tab in the Order Item Specification editor. OSM uses the fulfillment pattern to determine to which order components to add an order item and what dependencies exist between the order components.
OSM supports importing fulfillment patterns from the Oracle Siebel CRM product catalog through the use of an Enterprise Business Service (EBS). The EBS supports a query interface that enables modelers to specify a Siebel product class ID and retrieve its definition. During modeling, you map in Design Studio the product specification definition to a fulfillment pattern. See "Configuring Product-Specification-to-Fulfillment-Pattern Mapping" for more information.
When working with fulfillment patterns, refer to the following topics: