View source | View content page | Page history | Printable version   
Toolbox
Main Page
Upload file
What links here
Recent changes
Help

PDF Books
Show collection (0 pages)
Collections help

Search

Projects:CrossChannel/Functional Specification

Contents

My Project - Functional Specifications

This is a draft document, a preliminary set of thoughts to outline the functionality and facilitate the discussion.

Introduction

Openbravo provides today all the building blocks to support a multi-channel operation but it requires a relevant implementation effort. The solution can be better generalized, integrated and completed to make it much easier to implement. There are two main areas within this theme:

The purpose of this project is to allow out-of-the-box support to configurable cross-channel scenarios. The order-scenarios can include all defined channels and as such represent a cross-channel scenario. The configuration of these order-scenarios include:

Relation with eHUB project

The “Configurable cross-channel scenarios” project defines the steps, conditions and content of the order scenario, while the "eHUB" project defines how this is communicated to the relevant channel. The documents that describe the functional and technical requirements for this are found here: eHUB Functional Specification and eHUB Technical specifications.

This document describes the functional requirements for the configurable cross-channel order scenarios.

Scope

We limit the scope (for now) to those channels inside a scenario, that all belong to organizations of the same legal entity. Hence, a scenario where the order is placed in an organization belonging to entity A and delivered from a warehouse that belongs to organization in legal entity B is not part of this project. The mentioned case will be treated in the Advanced Order Scenarios project. Drop-Shipments and Trans-Shipments, if executed within the same legal entity, are part of the scope of this project.

The cross-channel scenario is (pre)defined on the highest organization level, inheritable and configurable on subsequent levels.

Cross Channel scenarios

When considering the functionalities for a Cross-Channel platform, we need to recognize that each organization -even within a group- might have specific rules to govern their business. A few examples of the diversity in the scenarios that Openbravo should support:

These examples above serve to deduce the factors that have influence on Cross-Channel scenarios. The first two examples influence the (sequence of the) steps while the third example influences the behavior or outcome of a specific step. Without the intention to be complete, the factors that influence in cross-channel scenarios include:

As result of this unforeseeable diversity, the Cross-Channel scenarios should be configurable -or better put constructable-. This construction would define the scenario by: a) concatenate the relevant business steps; b) add rules and parameters to each step with optionally default parameters.

Central Broker

In order to determine, for each order, if and when the next step can be executed there will be a central broker that governs the execution of the order-scenario. This broker is triggered by order-related activities in the database (such as payment received; shipment confirmed; ...) and determines if the next order-step can be executed by evaluating the conditions for the next step. If a next step is to be executed, the broker triggers the relevant step while providing the default data-values for that step.

Diversity and Rules

So now that we have recognized the need for constructing the cross-channel scenarios on the level of organization, let's extract all the potential building blocks ("steps") that together form a order-process. Once identified these steps, we can construct the scenarios from them.

Having said this, a "Pick&Carry" scenario has fewer steps than a "Click&Deliver", so lets picture first the most extensive cross-channel scenario and also the least extensive scenario, for the sake of the example excluding third-party deliveries as you can have with drop-shipments or trans-shipments.

The below images show the most-extensive and the least-extensive order scenario, excluding third-party shipments (Drop-Shipments and Trans-Shipments). The steps are not necesarily in the same sequence: For instance a pre-payment could be required in order to make a reservation and/or appointment.

Configurable X-channels-most extensive.jpg Configurable X-channels-least extensive.jpg


Subsequently, the increasing personalization that SMAC is enforcing upon society, creates the necesity to allow that each step in the order-process is/can be governed by RULES. Examples of personalized situations are:

References

Design Considerations

Assumptions

Dependencies

Constraints

Glossary

Functional Requirements

User roles & profiles

Business process definition

User stories

Functional requirements based on business processes

Open Discussion Items

Closed Discussion Items

Retrieved from "http://wiki.openbravo.com/wiki/Projects:CrossChannel/Functional_Specification"

This page has been accessed 1,942 times. This page was last modified on 26 November 2015, at 18:18. Content is available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 Spain License.