Oracle iStore

Enabling Service Items to be Sold via Configurator in Oracle i-Store

Author: Andy Avery Date: April 13th, 2011
Categories: Oracle Configurator, Oracle Supply Chain Management, Oracle iStore

One of my clients had a large Oracle Order to Cash footprint, where they were utilizing Configurator in both i-Store and in Order Management.  One of the integral parts of the guided selling process was to configure the products that the customer would be shopping for, but to also sell service at the same time to cover those products purchased.As it turned out, the Oracle functionality is not the same for configuring products with service in i-Store as it is in Order Management.   

In Order Management you can configure products with service items directly in the Configurator and the process works seamlessly.  Although in i-Store, you can only configure products and cannot actually configure the associated service at the same time.  This was a shock to the client because it was not consistent.  According to Oracle’s intended functionality, service items are able to be manually added to the shopping cart in i-Store, but only after the fact and not within the actual Configurator session.  As a result, the guided selling process was not seamless, manual steps would need to be performed, and the business could not require that mandatory service be sold in i-Store.

Client Justification: 

The client maintained that the expected functionality would be that the i-Store Configurator functionality would emulate what is available in Order Management and ultimately decided to customize the process to achieve the desired functionality.The goal was to eliminate the possibility for mistakes and foregone revenue and to utilize the Oracle Configurator rules engine and enable the guided configuration process to provide a simple user interface for customers.  

Limitations of Oracle Configurator: 

 During our initial discovery and testing of Service Contracts integration with i-Store and Configurator, we ran into this significant limitation.   

After opening a Service Request with Oracle Support and subsequently speaking with the Oracle i-Store and Configurator development teams, we came to this conclusion. This conclusion was that Oracle Inventory items with service enabled attributes cannot be used in the Oracle Configurator runtime session within Oracle i-Store.

This limitation in Oracle occurs within the entire Order Capture (ASO) process, which includes i-Store, Quoting Sales Manager, and Quoting HTML.