Appointment Periods vs Reservations

When an external system is used for appointments, it is not necessary to set up appointment period records in Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing ahead of time. The external system is responsible for providing the available appointment periods. When a user books an appointment with an external system, Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing creates an appointment period as an audit. This enables the user to view the appointment information when viewing the field activity in the system.

If the external system creates a reservation record for the appointment in its system, the unique identifier of that reservation may be stored with the field activity in Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing as a characteristic. The characteristic type to use is defined as a feature configuration option. The sample integration provided with the system populates the field activity characteristic with a reservation number received.