Integrating with Fulfillment and Billing Systems

This chapter provides an overview of fulfillment and discusses how to:

• Activate enterprise integration points (EIPs).

• Create autonumbering for orders and quotes.

• Map line statuses.

• Publish order and quote messages.

• Subscribe to order status messages.

• Subscribe to order and quote acknowledgements.

• Subscribe to advanced shipping notices (ASNs).

• Manage externally originating orders.

• Integrate with biilling systems.

Understanding Fulfillment

This section discusses:

• Integration setup.

• EIPs.

• Activation of EIPs for Use with PeopleSoft SCM.

• Order maintenance EIPs.

See Also

Defining Integrations and Mappings

Defining PeopleSoft Order Capture Business Units

Integration Setup

The primary setup of PeopleSoft Order Capture integration occurs in the PeopleSoft Order Capture Integration Workbench. The Integration Workbench is designed so that all of your fulfillment and maintenance activity can first be configured there. There are also a few fields that must be populated on the Business Unit Definition page.

EIPs

PeopleSoft Order Capture uses EIPs to transfer information between itself and an order fulfillment system, such as PeopleSoft Order Management or PeopleSoft Inventory. These integration points enable you to configure your PeopleSoft Customer Relationship Management (PeopleSoft CRM) collaborative selling solution to work with any third-party fulfillment system or enterprise application integration (EAI) system.

Note. Our delivered EIPs are configured for integration with PeopleSoft Supply Chain Management (SCM), which provides corresponding EIPs for example, EIPs that publish the information for which PeopleSoft CRM listens. Integration with other fulfillment or EAI systems may require the use of the PeopleTools Integration Broker to build the necessary transformation layer on top of the existing EIPs that PeopleSoft delivers.

PeopleSoft provides the following comprehensive set of EIPs to support the order fulfillment process:

Note. The EIPs listed in the preceding table use PeopleTools Integration Broker messages. Application Message Monitor and Send Master (a PeopleTools testing utility) help you track and test the messages and transformations that make up these EIPs. The Get Autonumber EIP is an exception in that it uses PeopleTools Business Interlink technology.

Activation of EIPs for Use with PeopleSoft SCM

If you are using PeopleSoft SCM, you need to:

• Activate the product, customer, and business unit EIPs.

  These EIPs synchronize the customer, product, and business unit data in the two systems. This synchronization is required when you use PeopleSoft SCM as your fulfillment system.

• Activate CRM transactions and relationships for the PSFT_EP node.

• Activate the SCM EIPs that support the CRM/SCM fulfillment integration.

  The SCM EIPs for Product Availability and Get Order Status are XML links rather than Integration Broker transactions; the activation process for those EIPs is therefore different.

Order Maintenance EIPs

Once an order is captured in PeopleSoft CRM, it is passed to the fulfillment system for processing. Order changes are sent from and received by the fulfillment system by means of appropriate EIPs. The EIPs support integrations with PeopleSoft SCM and other third-party fulfillment systems. The Get Order Status EIP is used as part of the Order Maintenance process when an order is retrieved for maintenance. This insures that PeopleSoft only allows edits on orders and order lines that have not yet been fulfilled.

Note. Order maintenance messages, such as CRM_SALES_ORDER_CHANGE, always contain RO_HEADER information, and always publish the RO_INTEGRATION, RO_HISTORY, and RO_CHARGE data for the order. The remainder of the CRM_SALES_ORDER_CHANGE data only contains order information that has been added or changed.

Order maintenance activities require that customer service representatives (CSRs) have accurate information about changed orders. The following table explains the four EIPs that form the backbone of PeopleSoft Order Capture's order maintenance activities:

Here is a complete list of the SCM EIPs to activate for complete fulfillment functionality:

• SALES_CRM_ORDER_LOAD

• SALES_CRM_QUOTE_LOAD

• ADVANCED_SHIPPING_NOTICE

• SALES_ORDER_ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

• SALES_QUOTE_NOTICE

• SALES_CRM_ORDER_CHANGE_LOAD

• SALES_ORDER_CHANGE_NOTICE

• SALES_ORDER_STATUS

Activating EIPs

You need to activate your fulfillment EIPs. If you are integrating with PeopleSoft SCM, you need to activate the Order Management and Inventory EIPs listed in the previous section as well.

This section discusses how to activate Integration Broker EIPs.

Activating Integration Broker EIPs

Integration Broker EIPs are inactive when delivered. To activate EIPs, activate each of the following elements:

• PeopleTools Application Messages: To activate a message from PeopleTools Application Designer, open the Message Properties dialog box and select the Active check box on the User tab.

  To activate a message subscription, right-click the message subscription and open the Message Subscription Properties dialog box. Select the Active check box to activate the subscription.

• Integration Broker Transactions: To activate a transaction, access the Transaction Detail page and set the Status to Active.

  You access this page from the Node Definitions component. If you do not first activate the PeopleTools Application Message, you receive a warning message when setting the transaction status to Active.

• Integration Broker Relationships: To activate a relationship and its transformations, access the Nodes page and set the relationship status to Active.

  Save the Nodes page, and then access the Trans Modifiers page. For each transformation, select Edit to open that transaction and set the status to Active. Save and select Return to Transaction List. You access this page from the Relationships component.

  Note. Integration Broker transactions and Integration Broker relationships are defined against node, PSFT_EP. If your PeopleSoft Order Management system uses a different node name, then you need to create Integration Broker relationships for the node name being used. Use the Integration Broker Transactions, Node Definitions screen. The copy utility enables the PSFT_EP transactions to be copied to a new node name.

Creating Autonumbering for Orders and Quotes

You can choose either the autonumbering or grid option for your orders and quotes. Autonumbers are controlled by business unit. When you set up autonumbering, you choose the business unit that controls autonumber generation and specify whether autonumbers are generated in the PeopleSoft CRM system or in an external fulfillment system.

Choosing a Business Unit to Control Autonumber Generation

When you define a PeopleSoft Order Capture business unit, you map it to a PeopleSoft Order Management business unit. You can map multiple PeopleSoft Order Capture business units to a single order management business unit. Therefore, to ensure a single source for all numbers that are sent to the order management system, PeopleSoft CRM uses the order management business unit to drive autonumbering. For example, if order capture business unit A is mapped to order management business unit B, then when you create an order in business unit A, its number is generated based on the rules for business unit B.

Note. By design, PeopleSoft SCM cannot use PeopleSoft CRM as its autonumbering master for orders and quotes, only for customers, contacts, and products.

Establishing an External ID Source for Orders and Quotes

You can generate order and quote numbers in the PeopleSoft CRM system or in your order fulfillment system. If the PeopleSoft CRM system does not have an external autonumbering master for orders and quotes, then order numbers are created locally. In this case, be sure that your autonumbering rules include a CRM-specific prefix so that numbers are unique across both your PeopleSoft CRM and order fulfillment system. If your fulfillment system is the autonumbering master, the Get Autonumber EIP fetches order numbers from the external system as orders are created. Because order numbers in both systems come from a common autonumbering definition, this configuration ensures that order numbers are unique across both systems.

Note. The external ID for an order or a quote in PeopleSoft Order Capture is used to identify the order or quote in your fulfillment system. The RO_INTEGRATION table stores the external ID data. This table stores the external ID by source code (for example, SCM), thus allowing for multiple external IDs per PeopleSoft CRM order. In addition to storing the external order number, we use this table to store a mapping of sequence numbers on header and line notes.

Notes no longer have sequence numbers in PeopleSoft CRM, but PeopleSoft SCM requires a sequence number to identify a note, which is why we map the information in RO_INTEGRATION. In our previous release, EXTERNAL_ID was simply a field on the RO_HEADER table.

Mapping Line Statuses

Once you send an order to your fulfillment system, that system is responsible for tracking status of the order; CRM integration points bring status information into PeopleSoft CRM to display the status of an order.

Understanding Line Status Mappings

Because different systems can use different order statuses, you must map your fulfillment system's statuses to PeopleSoft Order Capture statuses. The Get Order Status EIP reads the map and converts your fulfillment system's statuses into PeopleSoft Order Capture statuses. For line statuses, Partial means that if a part of one line is backordered and part is shipped, it is in fact, partially shipped.

Header status mappings may differ slightly. PeopleSoft delivers a map for all the PeopleSoft Order Management statuses. If you integrate with a different fulfillment system, modify the map accordingly.

Note. PeopleSoft Order Capture maps the status values to node, PSFT_EP, and if you are using a different node name for your Order Management system, you need to enter status mappings against your node name. The node name is read-only once the data is saved.

The following table shows the delivered line status mappings for SCM statuses:

Publishing Order and Quote Messages

When you capture an order or quote in PeopleSoft Order Capture, the system instantiates the CORE_ORDER_BP or CORE_QUOTE_BP business project. Both of these business projects include a task that runs the RO_EIP_PUB Application Engine process, which triggers the Publish Order and Publish Quote EIPs. These EIPs, which consist of the CRM_SALES_ORDER and CRM_SALES_QUOTE messages, make order and quote information available to your fulfillment system. PeopleSoft delivers the Integration Broker transformation rules required to integrate with SCM; integration with other systems requires additional transformation rules.

If you use PeopleSoft Order Management, EIPs receive the transformed messages and enter order data into Order Management staging tables. The orders have a source code of CRM and start with a status of Open.

Running Batch Jobs in PeopleSoft Order Management (PeopleSoft SCM customers only)

Subsequent to order submission, the PeopleSoft Order Management fulfillment process starts with the OMEC process followed by the OMBACK process; OMBACK moves the data from the staging tables into the order tables. In Order Management, you can set up exclusions to choose which subprocesses within OMBACK to run or skip based on the order source code. Because orders that originate in PeopleSoft CRM already have tax, freight, and pricing information, you should configure OMBACK to skip tax, freight, and pricing calculations for orders with the PeopleSoft CRM source code.

There are fours specific SCM processes you need to run to complete the pre-fulfillment tasks. These consist of:

1. Order Validation Process (OMEC)

2. Order Completion Process (OMBACK)

3. Outbound Acknowledgement (OMEC Outbound)

4. Data Exchange (Data Publish)

Note. If you navigate to Order Management, Quotes and Orders, Create/Update Order, and choose your business unit, you can search for any order and see that a specific order is In Process.

Understanding the Transformation Process

PeopleSoft delivers transformation rules that you can use when sending information to PeopleSoft Order Management. The Application Engine program that performs the transformation has three stages:

1. It evaluates products and packages that were ordered and transforms order lines as follows:

   1. Service products are not sent at all, but other products are sent exactly as defined in the order line

   2. Product packages are sent as packages, as there is a 1 to 1 mapping of information with PeopleSoft Order Management here. However, lightly configured packages are broken into multiple order lines and packages contained in other packages are broken into multiple order lines. Each product included in the package within a package is given its own order line. For example, if Package 1 consists of product A and Package 2, while Package 2 consists of products B and C, then an order line for Package 1 is broken into three order lines: one each for products A, B, and C.

      Note. If you use PeopleSoft SCM and you set pricing at the package level (rather than the component level), no pricing details are sent; each component is sent with a price of zero. Therefore, if you are a SCM customer, pricing for dynamic packages needs to be at the component level.

2. It performs an XSL transformation to structure the EIP data for Order Management.

3. It adds SCM customer information (for example, bill to and ship to addresses) to the order data by looking at the tables (RB_INT_CUSTOMER and RB_INT_CUST_ADS) that map PeopleSoft CRM customer data to SCM customer data. This mapping is maintained by the Customer Sync EIP.

Note. If you use PeopleSoft SCM as your fulfillment system, you must keep customer and product data synchronized in the two systems. The Customer Sync and Product Sync EIPs manage this synchronization.

Understanding the Message Content

This section describes certain parts of the order and quote messages published by CRM. For more details about the messages, refer to the EIP catalog and the message definitions. Order and quote messages published by PeopleSoft CRM include:

• EXTERNAL_ID field from the Integration table RO_INTEGRATION: This is the ID that maps to the order or quote number in the fulfillment system.

• Order Management business unit: This is the business unit that is associated with the PeopleSoft Order Capture business unit (on the Order Capture Business Unit Definition page).

• An order source code of “CRM”: If PeopleSoft Order Management is your fulfillment system, this code affects certain processes. For example, Order Management allows PeopleSoft CRM orders to be price protected.

• Order line numbers: PeopleSoft Order Capture expects the fulfillment system to carry the line numbers through the entire fulfillment process. For example, if an order has five lines and lines two, four, and five are sent to PeopleSoft Order Management, then the order in Order Management has three order lines numbered 2, 4, and 5. This enables order line tracking even when different order lines are sent to different fulfillment systems.

• Pricing: This includes order-level discounts, shipping, and tax information.

• A price protection setting: This prevents Order Management from altering price information.

• Order level discount information..

• Giveaway information: The ORDER_LINE_TAG field ties a giveaway to a specific order line.

• Credit card information: PeopleSoft stores encrypted credit card data, which is what the message sends.

• Quote messages: Quotes include additional information specific to quotes, such as the quote due date and expiration date.

Subscribing to Order Status Messages

In PeopleSoft SCM, the Data Exchanges > Publish Outbound Message utility enables you to publish a snapshot of the order as it exists in the SCM system. The Sales Order/Quote Status option enables you to publish orders by business unit, source code (for example, CRM), customer, order type, order number range, order date range, and order change date range. Also, you can choose to publish orders for specific order status values.

PeopleSoft Order Capture subscribes to these SALES_ORDER_STATUS messages to provide a method for synchronizing changes made to the order in SCM, so that the order reflects the same information. For example, if an order is maintained in SCM, and a new order line is added, the SALES_ORDER_STATUS message delivers that order and its new line to PeopleSoft Order Capture.

Also, as part of the SALES_ORDER_STATUS processing, the current order status is updated, just as the Get Order Status EIP provides.

If the SALES_ORDER_STATUS message contains orders that did not originate in PeopleSoft Order Capture (for example, EDI orders), then order header information is created so that these orders are viewable through the Order Search screen. When users drill down for further details, they are transferred to the uniform resource locator (URL) specified in the Source Code definition for that order. If no URL is specified, then the user is only able to view the header information for that order.

Getting On-Demand Status Updates

The Get Order Status EIP provides on-demand status updates. Users invoke the update by clicking the Refresh button on the Order Tracking page.

The Get Order Status EIP updates:

• The status for individual order lines.

• The scheduled shipping date and the scheduled arrival dates.

The EIP also updates the RO_LINE_HIST table, which stores a history of line statuses. You can query this history, but it does not appear on any PeopleSoft Order Capture pages.

Subscribing to Order and Quote Acknowledgements

In PeopleSoft SCM, the Batch Publish job publishes regular acknowledgments (the SALES_ORDER_ACKNOWLEDGEMENT and SALES_QUOTE_NOTICE messages) and change acknowledgements (the SALES_ORDER_CHANGE_NOTICE message) for orders that come from electronic commerce channels—that is, for orders that are entered into the SCM staging tables.

Note. Change acknowledgements are not published for orders that originate within PeopleSoft Order Management.

In PeopleSoft CRM, the Receive Order Acknowledgement and Receive Quote Acknowledgement EIPs subscribe to SCM messages, while the Receive Order Change Acknowledgement EIP subscribes to the change acknowledgement message. When PeopleSoft CRM receives a change acknowledgement, the order status and change history are updated, while rejected order changes are rolled back. When PeopleSoft Order Capture receives a regular order acknowledgement, it updates the order header status to In Process, and it sets the order line statuses to the line status map that you established in the Integration Workbench. When an SCM order line status is set to Open, and this is the status that the acknowledgement message sends, Order Capture maps this to a status of In Fulfillment.

Change History was created with a status of Open when order changes were initially submitted. When the change acknowledgement is processed, changes that were accepted by the Fulfillment system are marked Confirmed, and changes that are not accepted are marked Rejected. When a requested change is rejected, the original values on the order are restored back to their values prior to the change. For example, if a quantity on an order line was increased from 1 to 2, and that change is rejected because the order line had shipped, the quantity is restored to 1 following the processing of the change acknowledgement.

Change Acknowledgement updates order statuses just as the Get Order Status EIP does, providing a current snapshot of the order status at the time the Change Acknowledgement was published. Order statuses are set based on the status mapping that you establish. The Change Acknowledgement also creates order notifications based upon the setup for the Order Capture business unit.

Notifications may be specified to go to the customer, the CSR, both, or none, based on the acceptance of the changes that were requested. In addition, when notifications are specified for the CSR, the notification is sent based on the CSR's preferred notification setting as found in the Worker component, which can be email, worklist, or both. Notifications to the customer are sent to the email address of the contact listed on the order, or for a consumer order, the consumer's email address. If there is no email specified for the contact or consumer, notifications cannot be sent to the customer. Email notifications show the changes requested, along with the acceptance status of Confirmed or Rejected, and display the order following the Change Acknowledgement processing. A CSR's Worklist notification is a link to the order in the Order Capture Worklist.

Subscribing to ASNs

PeopleSoft Inventory publishes ASNs that provide the number of items that have shipped for a specific order line. These messages do not contain status information about items that have not shipped.

The Receive ASN EIP subscribes to the ASN message.

When PeopleSoft CRM receives an ASN, it updates statuses using the following logic:

1. The shipped quantity from the ASN is added to any previously recorded quantity shipped.

2. If the total shipped quantity is greater than or equal to the quantity ordered, the line and all items in the line have a status of Shipped.

3. If the total shipped quantity is less than the quantity ordered, the system assumes that the items with the highest status were shipped and adjusts statuses accordingly.

Since status numbers increase as an item moves through the fulfillment process, the unshipped item with the highest status is considered the most likely item to have been shipped.

For example, consider the following status update history for an order line consisting of ten items:

At 10:00 am, the order was submitted. An order acknowledgment message caused the system to set the status of all ten items to In Fulfillment.

At 1:00 pm, an ASN message indicated that five items had been shipped. Status changes for these five items and the remaining five items keep the status In Fulfillment.

At 2:00 pm, the order status message provided a complete status that replaced the previous status information.

At 5:00 pm, an ASN message indicated that three more items were shipped. Although the message does not specify which items were shipped, the system makes the following adjustments:

• The system adjusted the quantity shipped: the three additional shipped items are added to the five that were already known to have been shipped.

• Because the On Hold (status number 9000) has a higher status number than Back Ordered (status number 2000), the system assumed that the three items on hold were the ones that were shipped and modified the status accordingly.

Note. If an ASN is received for any component of a static package, the entire package is considered to have been shipped. Also, when any line on the order is marked with Shipped status, the Order Header is marked as Complete.

Managing Externally Originating Orders

This section explains how PeopleSoft Order Capture handles externally originating orders, and explains how to specify URLs for tracking purposes.

Handling External Orders

PeopleSoft Order Capture uses the Receive Orders EIP to create PeopleSoft CRM records for orders that originate in your fulfillment system (or any other external system). Unlike the Get Order Status EIP, the Receive Orders EIP does not attempt to match the external system's order numbers with Order Capture order numbers. Each Order Capture business unit definition specifies the source code that is used for orders created in the PeopleSoft CRM system. Orders that are entered by the Receive Orders EIP have a source code provided by the external system. Make sure that the source codes are different for orders that originate internally and externally.

Note. If a user attempts to view an order with a source code other than the one specified in the business unit definition, the system reroutes the user to a page that you specify. If you haven't specified a URL, then you see the header information in order tracking but you can't click on the order for details.

You can specify different target pages to be used when accessing orders in the internal Order Tracking page and the external (self-service) Order Tracking page. The system marks orders that originate outside of CRM, and if you provide the system with the URL for the external system, then a user who attempts to view such an order in the CRM order tracking pages is automatically redirected to the system where the order originated.

Integrating with Billing Systems

PeopleSoft Order Capture integrates with PeopleSoft Transaction Billing Processor to allow access to standard billing functionality such as revenue recognition structure, billing cycle details, and account rules for applying revenue to the General Ledger. It also allows the enterprise to apply surcharges and taxation to billable amounts and process them through user-defined invoice formats.

Setting Up an Integration to PeopleSoft Transaction Billing Processor

This integration is detailed in a chapter in the Services Foundation Peoplebook.

See Also

PeopleSoft Transaction Billing Processor 8.8 PeopleBook.

Transaction Billing Processor Integration

Using the PeopleSoft Transaction Billing Processor Integration from PeopleSoft Order Capture

If a contract doesn’t exist, the PeopleSoft Order Capture transaction triggers a new contract to be created in the Billing system. Pricing is done by the Enterprise Pricer through PeopleSoft Order Capture. For agreement products, pricing is also done by the Service Pricing routines. Peoplesoft Order Capture sends the total for each order line containing a service or agreement product to the PeopleSoft Transaction Billing Processor.

Note. PeopleSoft Transaction Billing Processor integrates with PeopleSoft Order Capture and enables you to create invoices and recognize revenue for service products. However, PeopleSoft Order Capture sends standard products through the integration to PeopleSoft Order Management. PeopleSoft Order Capture uses PeopleSoft Proposal Management to send engagement-type services.

PeopleSoft Order Capture only sends transactions that are ready to be billed to PeopleSoft Transaction Billing Processor. PeopleSoft Order Capture also sends tax parameters, which are used to retrieve the sales and use tax or VAT rate.

See Also

PeopleSoft Transaction Billing Processor 8.8 PeopleBook.