Constituting the Flow

Orchestrate with a central hub

• Connect your sales channels
• Connect your fulfillment channels and systems
• Orchestrate order fulfillment, omnichannel

Understand your omnichannel business performance

• What have you sold, so far today?
• What trends or patterns do you need to react to?
• Are you delivering on your customer promise?
• Across all channels, including point of sale

Adapt your strategy and tactics, easily

• Configure and tailor your order processes in one place
• Add new scenarios to take advantage of market opportunities
• Insights to drive updates in other modules, like Sourcing & Availability
• And to drive organizational updates, outside any system

Order Management Framework centers on three main elements - orchestration, understanding, and adaptation. These pillars aid in assimilating all the order-related information and updates into SAP Order Management Foundation. 'Understanding' involves gauging what has happened, for instance, comparing the expected ship date to the actual ones.

However, the primary focus of this lesson is 'Flow,' signifying 'Adapt.' Flow is about easily updating your strategies or tactics, tailoring processes for different situations, and creating new ones to leverage market opportunities. An example of 'adapting' can be seen during the COVID pandemic. Many businesses had to implement curbside pickup swiftly when in-store pickup became nonviable due to lockdown restrictions. Thus, having a tool that supports easy process modifications or new process creation bolsters your chances of business survival and growth amidst challenging times.

Even outside of extraordinary situations like a pandemic, businesses must maintain agility and adapt swiftly. Market conditions, customer expectations, and competitors are dynamic, necessitating quick and effective responses from businesses. The ideal way to do this is by making changes in a decoupled middle layer that neither jeopardizes your digital core nor requires significant changes to the customer experience. The essence of this lesson lies in recognizing the importance of adaptability.

The basic flow involves orders coming in, requests going out, and activities returning, which are then published to the event mesh. Additionally, the activities and other events triggered within SAP Order Management foundation can be used to initiate specific actions. This dynamic functionality allows for adaptability and responsiveness in operational workflows based on the evolving business requirements and scenarios.

Remember the basic flow is orders in, requests out and activities back. Those activities as well as related events can be used to trigger actions.

The operational flow is visually represented by orders coming 'In', requests going 'Out', and then receiving 'Activities' back in response. This representation underscores the interplay and handover that takes place within the flow sequence. This ongoing back-and-forth forms a significant part of the operational workflow in SAP Order Management foundation.

The emphasis in this context is on the 'activities' within the flow sequence. These activities act as triggers for initiating workflows. Furthermore, these triggered workflows may, in turn, generate additional activities. This shows how activities can ignite a chain of events, providing a basis for creating versatile and responsive operational workflows.

The SAP Order Management foundation is a low-code, no-code environment with a simple, drag-and-drop interface. The basic trigger by default is an order activity notification, which is customizable and can be managed. More triggers, such as other events and direct API calls, are planned to be added in the future.

It's easy to see the flow of operations, as you can click on each field and view its content. Modifying these flows is straightforward and, over time, template flows will be provided out of the box to further facilitate the process. Snapshots of these templates can be taken for reference, allowing creation of customized versions, or to revert back to the original template.

The main function of the system initially is to respond to activities and events, allowing for tailored processes suitable for different situations. For instance, if there's a rejection from a fulfillment system, you might want to trigger a notification either to an employee to investigate it or to ask a customer for their preference before making a decision. There are standard and custom actions available, allowing you to call something within SAP Order Management foundation itself or set up calls to an API, provided a destination is setup in SAP BTP.

Demonstrating this process, we move to the 'flows' section. Flows can be active or inactive. When creating a new flow, it starts off with a trigger. The default events are the ones that we predefined. If an order activity notification is preferred, you usually have a list from which you can select. This drop-down list is built based on the configurations set up earlier. The next step is to perform an operation such as a standard action, for instance, fetching items from an order. This provides a succinct overview of how flows in SAP Order Management foundation are created and managed.

Continuing with the flow creation, you might want to add a custom action next. This is where operations like GET, PATCH, or POST can be defined - essentially closing something from the destination service on BTP. During this step, you will be prompted to write in your request. Additionally, you could add headers as per your needs, along with their keys and values, and add more as required.

An important note: to edit a flow, it must first be deactivated. This crucial step is to prevent changes to an operational sequence of actions in real time. Active flows cannot be modified directly; however, you can view different information already included in the flow. For example, examining a custom action in an active flow can help understand its configuration and operation further.

As a part of the custom action, you might employ a DELETE method to direct it to a specific service. In this particular scenario, a mock service is used. The system also allows you to monitor the ongoing processes within specific flows. Even though it's a test system with limited data, the basic concept becomes evident fairly quickly. Several actions can be strung together as per the requirements, showcasing the adaptability and flexibility of the system.

The ultimate aim is not just to react to individual activities, but also to handle the end-to-end process of an order over time. Hence, envision breaking down validation steps and enrichment steps in the order submission process into finer functionalities. With this, the flow can be used to determine the operation of a function based on the context.

For example, replacing an existing validation with a custom one, or adding an extra custom validation might be needed for a specific market or scenario. A case in point: for some products in industries like pharmaceuticals or alcohol, cross-border shipping restrictions might apply - between provinces, states, or countries. Such requirements could be easily incorporated with this feature.

The upcoming release is focused on incorporating conditions, the 'if this, then that' functionality, offering greater control. Along with this, additional out-of-the-box actions will be introduced, and partner collaborations will be targeted to further enrich the functionality offering.