About Functional Areas

Functional areas are the logical layers of an installation and can be commercial, service, and technical layers. These layers are supported by an Order and Service Management order type or by an external order management system.

When configuring functional areas, you specify whether the functional area supports actions. If it does, you indicate which conceptual model entities support the type of actions defined by the functional area and whether these actions are multi-instance. For example, the Service functional area supports actions, but only on customer facing services, resource facing services, and resources. The Technical functional area supports actions also, but those actions can be associated only to resource facing services and resources.

You can define default data elements for service actions associated with a functional area. These elements are automatically tagged with the Implicit Parameter tag, which cannot be removed. When a service action is created, the default data elements defined in the Functional Area editor appear as read-only on the Service Action editor Data Elements page.

Functional areas are associated with a list of action codes. Each action code, such as Remove, Modify, Add, and so forth, represents an action that can be performed on a conceptual model entity. When a new action of the type defined by the functional area is created, all of the action codes defined in the functional area are added to the new action. You can define the applicability of each default data element to the service action codes associated the functional area.