1 About the Task Web Client

This chapter describes the basic functions and provides an overview of the Oracle Communications Order and Service Management (OSM) Task web client.

OSM includes two web clients that you can use to manage orders:

• Task web client: Use this application to monitor and manage the tasks in an order. This application is typically used by order processing personnel to ensure that all the tasks are completed. It is also used by order fallout managers. You can also suspend and resume orders, cancel orders, and create orders manually.

• Order Management web client: Use this application to display an order's orchestration plan, including dependencies, orchestration stages, order components, order items, and processes. Displaying the orchestration plan is useful for developers who are modeling orders and need to see relationships between order items. You can also perform some order management tasks, such as suspending and resuming orders, cancelling orders, and managing fallout. You can open the Orchestration Management web client from within the Task web client. See "Opening the Order Management Web Client" for more information.

Overview of the Task Web Client

The Task web client provides the user interface for order tracking and operational reporting information. You use it to create, view, edit, track, and report on orders and tasks in the OSM system using a browser. The system administrator and a user who is a part of the OMS_client group can access the OSM Task web client.

In the Task web client, you use the Worklist screen to manage your orders and tasks. It displays a list of tasks in a table for which you are responsible or which are available for you to process. Each row in the table represents an instance of a task for a particular order. You can view, add, or modify the order data included in the task view using the Task Editor. Sorting and filtering options help you to find tasks in the Worklist.

What You Do with the Task Web Client

You use the Task web client to do the following:

• Assign tasks

  If you have assignment privileges for a given task, you can assign tasks to a specific workgroup.

• Edit order data included in tasks

  You can display or edit orders in the Task Editor page. Orders are displayed according to an order's data at a given task. According to the how the order is designed in Oracle Communications Design Studio, the fields are mandatory, read-only or read-write.

  What you do when editing orders depends on the business requirements of your organization. Typical order editing tasks include:

  • Adding or changing customer information, such as modifying the bandwidth and changing the DSLAM port.

  • Changing priority information.

  • Changing the state/status of an order.

  See "Editing Order Data in a Task" for more information.

• Manage notifications

  Notifications can be used to notify you of processes or tasks in jeopardy. OSM provides the capability of sending event notifications to user and groups once, periodically, or when certain conditions arise in an order or task. You can also configure notifications to be sent by email to user groups.

  The Notifications page is where you view and acknowledge notifications on the order process or order data in the OSM system. When a given notification condition is detected, each targeted user and workgroup is notified and an entry is added to the notification list.

  Notifications are set up in Design Studio. If you are a solution modeler, see the Design Studio Help for more information.

• Manage order exceptions

  An exception is a mechanism used to interrupt or stop an order, or to redirect it to any task in the same process or any other process.

  See "About Raising Exceptions" for more information.

• Create orders

  Orders typically originate from one or more external order entry systems and are not manually created.

  See OSM Concepts for more information.

• Run queries to find orders

  You can locate any order in the OSM system using the Query option. You can query for any order, including completed orders.

  See "About the Query Preferences Page" for more information.

• View order history and audit data

  Audit data is captured with each order for all changes to data and is maintained as long as needed in the OSM system. You can use this information for operational, service level agreement, or business analysis purposes. Order History provides a process history for a given order. When task state changes occur, OSM records the date and time of the change, and the user who made the change.

  See "Viewing Process History" for more information.

• Run reports to get data about orders in the OSM system

  Reports provide summarized information on all orders and tasks in the OSM system. For example, you can view reports such as, the number of overdue orders, the oldest orders, the most recent orders, and the completed tasks for each order.

  The order detail report provides information on any order in the system. You can view, print, or save this report to an ASCII text file.

  See "Viewing Reports" for more information.

About OSM Tasks

Most of the work you perform in the Task web client is based on completing OSM tasks. A task is a step in a process. Typically, tasks are activities on an order and can be manual or automated. Orders that are in progress (have started but have not completed) can have more than one active task simultaneously. This means that one or more users can be working on a single order simultaneously, though only one user can work on a specific task for that order at any one time.

Manual tasks are tasks that you perform using the Task web client. As an order moves through a process, it arrives at tasks based on the way the process is defined. When an order arrives at a task, it is added to the worklist of all the members of all the workgroups who are assigned to work on that task. Users belonging to those workgroups can see the new task in their worklist when they refresh the Worklist page by clicking the Refresh button. Users can select a task from their worklist to view the assigned task in the order process.

Automated tasks are used primarily to provide interfaces to other systems. They may occasionally show up briefly in the Worklist, depending on your system configuration, but you can usually ignore them.

A task duration is specified in Design Studio, and is used to calculate expected duration of an order. The duration for both automated and manual tasks is expressed in weeks, days, hours, minutes, or seconds. The duration can be evaluated either based on normal clock/calendar time or on the schedule defined for the workgroup to which the task is assigned, depending on how the task is configured. For more information about workgroup schedules, see OSM System Administrator's Guide. For more information about task types and states, see OSM Concepts. You can see the expected completion date of a task, based on the expected duration, in the Process History page. For more information about the process history, see "Viewing Process History".

Task states are used to indicate what is happening to a task. Tasks have the following predefined states:

• Accepted

• Assigned

• Completed

• Received

You can manually change the state of a task. Changing the state of the task is known as transitioning the task. Also, the state of the task transitions automatically when you perform an action, such as complete the task. See "Changing the State and Status of a Task" for more information.

About OSM Processes

A process is a sequence of tasks that are executed consecutively or concurrently to fulfill an order or part of an order. For example, an extremely simple process might start with a manual task to add inventory information, continue with an automated task to a provisioning system to create a service on the network, and complete with an automated task to update a CRM system with the order completion.

Processes are of the following types:

• Standard: In a standard process, OSM returns you to the worklist after it completes each task.

• Workstream: In a workstream process, OSM takes you directly to the next task, without first returning you to the worklist, as long as you are a member of the workgroup that is assigned to the next task. You can, however, stop a workstream task from processing, or reassign it. See "About Workstream Processes" for more information.

Standard and workstream processes are defined by the designer in Design Studio.

About Managing Tasks

In most cases, orders are created in an external system such as a CRM, and sent to OSM for processing.

A typical process for managing a task is as follows:

1. The task is displayed in your Worklist.

2. You accept the task.

3. You use the Task Editor to make the required changes to the task data.

4. You complete the task.

5. If configured, the next manual task in the process for the order is displayed in the Worklist for processing.

About Managing Orders

You can perform the following order operations using the Task web client.

• Add remarks to orders: Adding a remark to an order enables you to record information about the order.

• Suspend and resume orders: Suspending an order temporarily stops all activity on that order. You typically suspend an order when you need to wait for requirements to be collected to complete a task and don't want anything done to the order. When it is possible to resume processing the order, you resume it.

• Raise exceptions on orders: You raise exceptions on orders for the following purposes:

  • To redirect the order to another task.

  • To immediately stop processing an order.

  When you initiate fallout on an order, you might need to process redo and undo compensation tasks. See OSM Concepts for more information about how changes to orders are managed.

  • Perform an undo task to undo and roll back the changes made from the task that caused the error.

  • Perform a redo task to redo the task that caused the error.

• Cancel an order: Cancelling an order stops all OSM activity on that order and undoes all the completed tasks as defined in the compensation for the task.

• Amend an order: An order can be amended automatically or manually. You amend an order when the order information needs to be revised outside the context of a manual task. You must revise the order by making minimum changes to the order. When an order changes, the system identifies all task instances that are affected by the changed order data. Some tasks can be changed automatically by the system, but others need to be manually worked on. In that case, the order transitions to the Amending state. The system builds a compensation plan based on all affected task instances, and creates redo or undo tasks as necessary.