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  • 1.  TMF622 vs Customer Order Management

    TM Forum Member
    Posted Sep 10, 2018 12:33

    Hi All,
    I have a question about naming inconsistency between TMF622 OpenAPI (Product Ordering Management) and eTOM&SID&TAM.
    According to specs:
    1. eTOM: "Order Handling" core process in "Customer" domain.
    2. SID: "Customer Order ABE" in "Customer" domain.
    3. TAM: "Customer Order Management" application in "Customer" domain.
    4. OpenAPI: "ProductOrder" is used as a resource (model, naming etc).

    So the questions is:

    What's the reason to have such naming inconsistency (customer vs product) between frameworks? In other words what's the reason to have different naming for data and integration models? Is there any benefit to have this inconsistency in solutions? is it planned to align naming for frameworks?



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    Mikhail Alekseyev
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  • 2.  RE: TMF622 vs Customer Order Management

    TM Forum Member
    Posted Oct 03, 2018 07:35
    Hi Mikhail

    I would hesitate to make a sweeping generalization about why there are discrepancies between the different TMF Frameworx initiatives. But specifically for the case of order, which you have mentioned in your post, I could hazard a guess that the newest initiative (Open API) has taken a more focused approach. Since for all practical purposes orders at customer level are for Products (offered by product catalog as product offering) the API team presumably felt that the term Product Order is more accurate and focused than the SID term Customer Order (which has now morphed into Party Order) - note that SID has ProductOrder as an example type.

    This is my opinion only, I was not involved in the earlier stages of Open API so I cannot give a definitive answer for this decision.

    More generally, the conceptual information model used in the Open API is very strongly based on SID, but with simplifications applied as per the needs of an implementable API as perceived by the API designer. We are working on producing mapping documents that show this correspondence between Open API and SID entities, some documents have already been published.

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    Jonathan Goldberg
    Amdocs Management Limited
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  • 3.  RE: TMF622 vs Customer Order Management

    TM Forum Member
    Posted Nov 05, 2021 03:50
    Hi, 

    this thread is a little old but while I am at it (and for posteriority :-)), I am going to briefly describe my view:

    1. I agree that this probably is due to the incomplete alignment between the Frameworx initiatives.
    2. On the other hand, I think there is an aspect that points towards a natural distinction between process/application vs. API scope. This also is an issue in almost every project (which are quite a few) we are working on:
    - Customer Order Management (as an eTOM-process, often also as an application (regarding TAM)) deals with complete customer orders.
    - This process typically also includes (validating and creating) the customer account and billing accounts, customer locations, the formal contract/agreements and then handing over the order to fulfillment.
    - This involves managing a couple of business entities which are not in scope of Product Order Management (namely providing the ordered product) on which the TMF 622 API focusses.

    Regards,
    Andreas

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    Andreas Schlueter
    NTT DATA CORPORATION
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