An Overview of Campaigns, Packages and Orders

An order is used to define:

• Demographic information about a customer / prospect.
• Geographic information about the service address.
• The customer's response to eligibility-oriented questions. For example, you can pose questions like: Who is your current energy service provider? / Would you like to pay automatically? / What is your date of birth?

After the above information is defined, the order transaction presents packages that may be offered to the customer. A package controls the various types of service agreements that will be created if the customer selects the package.

If the customer elects to take a package, the order transaction sets up / updates the "V" (along with all of the ancillary things that happen when service is initiated, e.g., field activities are created). Please note that in addition to setting up the "V", it's also possible to populate / update other information when a package is selected. For example, you could have the system setup the customer's automatic payment options.

All orders must reference a campaign. An order's campaign defines:

• How the campaign's orders use accounts and premises. For example, you can indicate that a given campaign is only targeted at existing premises (thus preventing the creation of a new premise when an order is completed).
• The type of information defaulted onto an order. For example, you can setup a campaign to default a given account management group on all orders linked to the campaign. This account management group will subsequently default onto the new account when the order is completed.
• The validation rules that control how its orders use accounts and premises. Specifically, on a campaign you define if an account / premise is required / optional / not allowed on its orders. In addition, if an account / premise is required or optional, you can control whether new accounts / premises can be created when an order is completed (the alternative is to force each order to use an existing account / premise). These controls prevent the unwanted proliferation of new accounts and premises for campaigns that are targeted at existing accounts and premises.
• The eligibility-oriented questions that are posed to the customer when an order is taken. For example, the questions indicated above - Who is your current energy service provider? / Would you like to pay automatically? / What is your date of birth? - are all defined on the order's campaign.
• The superset of packages that can be offered to a customer whose order references this campaign. An order's campaign defines the types of packages that may be selected.
• In addition to the above, campaigns also control high-level eligibility rules and business process flows.