Link with requesting and fulfillment
An offer can be linked with the requesting and fulfillment processes administered by USU Service Management. The linking must be done in the USU Service Management application.
In USU Service Management, open the USU Shop Fulfillment business view and locate a Shop offers catalog. The following Shop offer attributes are relevant for request and fulfillment linking:
BPM correlation key
Correlation keys identify individual processes of the USM business process engine. The assignment of a correlation key to an offer tells the process engine to start a specific fulfillment process when the offer is requested. The process as well as the process key are defined within USU Service Management.
Some background information: Whenever an order is requested in the Shop, the main requesting process (named USU Shop2 Main) gets triggered in USM. This process scans all requested items and checks if any of the related offers have a correlation key assigned. When an assigned correlation key is identified, a fulfillment sub-process corresponding to that key is triggered.
Model ticket
When an offer is requested, the fulfillment process can use one of the model tickets defined in USM to create a service request ticket on its basis.
Setting up an offer for using a model ticket is done in the USU Shop Fulfillment business view in the following way:
Open for editing the offer which should use a model ticket.
Go to the BPM correlation key field in the Process section of the editor and assign correlation key Shop Service Request Ticket. This correlation key triggers a process capable of creating a service request ticket on the basis of a model ticket.
Once the Shop Service Request Ticket correlation key has been selected, a new mandatory field Model ticket appears in the Process section. Use this field to assign the model ticket which will be used for ticket creation when this offer is requested.
Save the offer.
As a result: Correlation key Shop Service Request Ticket triggers process USU.Shop.ServiceRequestTicket (both available in standard USU Service Management). The process takes data from the request and creates a ticket, then it waits until the ticket is closed and subsequently also closes the request.
The above described process of setting up an offer for using a model ticket uses a BPM correlation key and a process available for this purpose in the standard version of USU Service Management. It is, of course, possible to create your own processes and correlation keys for using a model ticket and link them to offers in the above described way. (When creating the correlation key, make sure that its Use model ticket (USU Shop) check box is checked. This enables model ticket selection in the correlation key editor.)
Item type
USM item types refer to all deliverable products and services that can be purchased under the same name. The assignment of an item type to an offer can be useful for goods provisioning, CI management, monitoring or reporting. The actual use of this assignment will depend on the underlying processes.
Validation status
Validation status signifies whether the offer is properly prepared for fulfillment processing. It is assigned manually to the Shop offer (in USU Service Management) by the responsible person upon checking that all attributes needed to run the fulfillment process of the particular offer are specified correctly. The following validation status values are possible:
New - to be validated: Fulfillment attributes of the offer must be checked.
Valid for processing: Fulfillment attributes of the offer have been checked and are specified correctly.
Modified - to be validated: Fulfillment attributes of the offer have changed since their last validation and need to be checked again.
The section of offer detail displays the values of the above described attributes. Use it to see how the offer is prepared for fulfillment processing. If adjustments are necessary, go to USU Service Management and make the changes there.
Note that values displayed in the section are cached. This means that changes recently made in USU Service Management are not reflected in offer detail until the next cached values refresh (frequency of which is determined by the Cache lifetime value in Shop settings). To make sure that values displayed in the shop correspond to the current USU Service Management values, use the Clear cache function in shop Settings / Configuration / Cache management.