Open APIs

Good day everyone,

I want to implement the following use case: I want to allow Customers to provide estimations for how much units (PSCVs) they believe they will consume in a time frame (e.g., in a month), provide recommendations for and let them place the Order, including the values of their initial estimations. I want to have the values available for Customer Support Agents in case they need to upsell a Customer, as well as may use the values for billing.

For achieving this, I was looking at leveraging the Agreement#characteristics (considering the fact that, they are not configurable PSCVs, being not required for fulfilling the service; I have also considered the solution suggested here: https://engage.tmforum.org/communities/community-home/digestviewer/viewthread?MessageKey=3bf68f8f-f5c6-4a4a-9448-05930ca37ed2&CommunityKey=019f32c2-82b7-427f-8156-f9262fe138fe&tab=digestviewer#bm3bf68f8f-f5c6-4a4a-9448-05930ca37ed2, but I need to also persist this values after placing the Order, in the Inventory). Nevertheless, the estimations are linked to an PO, rather then to an entire Order, and I see that the Order has a list of Agreements, which I would need to map to the POs to see what characteristics (estimations) are assigned to what POs. 

Is there any reason for which AgreementItems do not have characteristics (because like this, I could link characteristics directly to the POs and Products)? Or am I looking at a wrong solution for my Use Case? 

Any input is welcome :)

Monica Secelean
IBM

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Monica Secelean
IBM Corporation
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Hi Monica
I think you have a point here, it would be useful to add characteristics to agreement items.
However I believe it would be an abuse to use agreement characteristics for your use case.
Product characteristics are not necessarily there just to fulfil the service. The product characteristics might exist independently of the implementation of the service in the network, e.g. the color of a device (trivial), or, in your case, to impact billing. So I believe that you should define this estimate as a configurable characteristic and so it will be saved on your product in the inventory.
Hope it helps

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Jonathan Goldberg
Amdocs Management Limited
Any opinions and statements made by me on this forum are purely personal, and do not necessarily reflect the position of the TM Forum or my employer.
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Hi Jonathan,

Thanks for your reply, will certainly consider it!

Monica

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Monica Secelean
IBM Corporation
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Original Message:
Sent: Mar 09, 2021 11:58
From: Jonathan Goldberg
Subject: Agreement#Characteristics Semantics - TMF 651

Hi Monica
I think you have a point here, it would be useful to add characteristics to agreement items.
However I believe it would be an abuse to use agreement characteristics for your use case.
Product characteristics are not necessarily there just to fulfil the service. The product characteristics might exist independently of the implementation of the service in the network, e.g. the color of a device (trivial), or, in your case, to impact billing. So I believe that you should define this estimate as a configurable characteristic and so it will be saved on your product in the inventory.
Hope it helps

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Jonathan Goldberg
Amdocs Management Limited
Any opinions and statements made by me on this forum are purely personal, and do not necessarily reflect the position of the TM Forum or my employer.
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