8 Working with Business Interactions and Workflow-Related Specifications

In Oracle Communications Unified Inventory Management (UIM), you use business interactions, engineering work orders, and projects to plan and organize how you build and maintain your network. You can optionally associate workflow templates with business interactions and engineering work orders. Workflow templates enable you to manage work and the people you assign to complete it.

In Design Studio, you define specifications for entities related to planning and workflow:

• Business Interaction specifications define arrangements for completing a set of activities, such as adding resources to the network to increase capacity or to support new locations. See "Working with Business Interaction Specifications" for more information.

• Process specifications define ordered sequences of activities and transitions that accomplish a goal, such as installing a device or designing a network. When deployed to UIM, Process specifications become workflow templates that you can associate with business interactions and engineering work orders. See "Working with Process Specifications" for more information.

• Task specifications define activities that must be completed as part of a workflow. In Design Studio, you associate Task specifications with the activities that are included in a Process specification. See "Working with Task Specifications" for more information.

• Checklist specifications define steps that must be included to complete an activity. You associate Checklist specifications with activities in a Process specification. See "Working with Checklist Specifications" for more information.

You use two other types of entities in UIM for related purposes:

• Engineering work orders are specialized versions of business interactions with some added functionality. In UIM, all engineering work orders are based on the same Business Interaction specification (Engineering Work Order), which is supplied as part of the ora_uim_workorder base cartridge.

  Note:

  The engineering work orders you create in Design Studio are not the same as engineering work orders in UIM. Engineering work orders in Design Studio are used as containers for Process, Task, and Checklist specifications. Engineering work orders and the specifications they contain become workflow templates in UIM. See "Designing Workflows" for more information.

• UIM projects enable you to manage grooming and rehoming activities for channelized connectivity. You can also use them to group related business interactions and engineering work orders so that you can manage them together. All UIM projects are based on the same specification, called Managed Project, to differentiate them from Design Studio cartridge projects. You can modify the Managed Project specification to include characteristics that you define. See "Working with the Managed Product Specification" for more information.