22 Parties

This chapter explains how to use Party entities in Oracle Communications Unified Inventory Management (UIM).

About Parties

You define Party specifications to model the people or organizations that interact with your inventory. Party specifications answer the business question of who is involved in your inventory. For example, you could define a Party specification called Individual to represent people such as contacts, employees, subscribers, or decision makers. You could also define a Party specification called Business to represent organizations such as vendors, resellers, service providers, or customers.

Parties often play specific roles in your inventory. Sometimes the role is implicit in the definition of a Party specification. For example, if you define a Party specification called Employee, you may not need to make its role any more explicit.

In other cases, you can assign roles that are defined by Role specifications. In UIM, you can assign one or more roles to an entity based on a Party specification. For example, you could create an entity based on the Individual specification and assign it the role of Contact or Subscriber. See "Roles" for more information about assigning roles to parties.

You can associate parties to entities and specify the role played by the party in the involvement. See "Involvements" for more information about involvements.

Entities that can be related to parties include:

• Custom Network Address

• Custom Object

• IP Networks

• Network Node

• Pipe Termination Point

• Product

• Service