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Writer's pictureAnuj Vaishampayan

Revenue Lifecycle Management: Part 5 - Dynamic Revenue Orchestrator (DRO)



Revenue Lifecycle Management (RLM) is the latest and greatest Configure Price Quote (CPQ) solution from Salesforce. In this blog post series, we will deep dive into RLM and compare features to the capabilities of Industries CPQ and Industries OM.


Start with our earlier posts before jumping into this post


Dynamic Revenue Orchestrator (DRO)

 

Dynamic Revenue Orchestrator (DRO) empowers businesses to decompose and orchestrate intricate order processes with exceptional flexibility and efficiency. DRO breaks down products and order lines, enabling bespoke fulfilment plans for each product. This ensures a tailored experience for customers regardless of the order's complexity.


Order fulfilment is a crucial process in the lifecycle of an order, involving multiple system touchpoints to ensure the efficient completion of the order. Each touchpoint in this journey plays a significant role, contributing to the smooth and timely fulfilment of customer orders.

 

 

Key Features of Dynamic Revenue Orchestrator


DRO draws a lot of parallels to the capabilities, approach, and even look-and-feel established by Industries Order Management.


Fulfilment Automation


DRO offers robust fulfilment automation capabilities, allowing you to configure how an offer, bundle, or product added to an order is broken down into fulfilment orders. This automation streamlines the fulfilment process, ensuring efficiency and accuracy.


Design Time Fulfillment


DRO provides tools for designing orchestration tasks with precision. Key design-time features include:

  • Create Fulfillment Step Definitions Groups: Define lanes for different fulfilment paths.

  • Add Fulfillment Step Definitions to Fulfillment Step Groups: Add specific tasks to each lane, ensuring each step of the fulfilment process is accounted for.

  • Identify Dependencies: Clearly outline task dependencies to maintain order and efficiency.

  • Reuse Plans: Design fulfilment plans that can be assigned to products and reused between products via Product Fulfillment Scenarios, enhancing consistency and saving time.


 

Fulfillment Step Definition Group and Fulfillment Step Definition mirror the Orchestration Plan Definition and Orchestration Item Definition objects from Industries Order Management but are now part of the Standard core data model.


Runtime Order Decomposition


DRO allows you to see how the order is broken down at runtime. Each order is decomposed into fulfillment orders and fulfilment order lines, giving you visibility into how each item is handled. This ensures that each order line item can be individually managed, even if it requires multiple fulfilment lines.



Fulfillment Order and Fulfillment Order Items map directly to Fulfillment Request and Fulfillment Request Lines from Industries Order Management, though similar to the CPQ line items, Fulfillment Request Line attributes are no longer stored in a single field containing a JSON, but rather in a child object to Fulfillment Order Item called Fulfillment Line Attribute.


DRO Task Types


DRO supports five types of tasks that can be used in Fulfillment Step Definitions, providing the flexibility needed to manage diverse order fulfilment scenarios:



These map directly to the same Orchestration Item types in Industries OM, though “Push Event” has been renamed to “Pause Event” – we welcome this change as Push Events are used to pause and wait for an update from a downstream system, so this should be more clear for newcomers.


Advantages of Using DRO


  • Enhanced Flexibility: DRO’s ability to decompose and orchestrate order processes offers unparalleled flexibility, accommodating complex and customized fulfilment plans.

  • Improved Efficiency: Automation and clear task design streamline the fulfilment process, reducing errors and improving speed.

  • Tailored Customer Experience: Custom fulfilment plans ensure each customer receives a tailored experience, enhancing satisfaction and loyalty.

  • Visibility and Control: Real-time order breakdowns provide visibility and control over the fulfilment process, ensuring every step is accounted for.


Functional Architecture



The functional architecture remains largely unchanged from Industries OM – catalog driven and highly configurable. Order Management or Dynamic Revenue Orchestration is broken into two phases:


Decomposition: After submitting an order, the system breaks it down into smaller technical orders called Fulfillment Orders, typically corresponding to the different downstream systems we need to send them to, such as billing. These Fulfillment Orders contain their own Fulfillment Order Items of the line items that need to be sent to those systems. This approach allows to have simple, performant commercial products that are fast and easy for your Sales Reps to configure in the CPQ, and more complex structures that are required to send in integrations to other systems.


Orchestration: Based on our commercial Order Items or Fulfillment Order Items, we then generate a comprehensive Fulfillment Plan, which is created based on all of the line items (commercial Order Items and Fulfillment Order Items) and the Fulfillment Task / Group Definitions linked to them via Product Fulfillment Scenarios.


Closing Thoughts


Dynamic Revenue Orchestration clearly draws significant inspiration from Industries Order Management. The general approach is the same, and the data model is very similar, although the objects have moved into the Standard core data model. We like the approach taken with Industries Order Management and are pleased to see DRO following suit – as the saying goes: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.


For those coming from Salesforce CPQ (Steelbrick) backgrounds, there will be a significant learning curve as there is no equivalent in Salesforce CPQ, so this will effectively be a net-new module for you. For those coming from Salesforce Order Management (SOM) backgrounds, some high-level concepts will be shared, but DRO support much more complex use cases compared to SOM, so you will have a bit of a leg up with a smaller learning curve.


We look forward to deep diving with you into Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) in our next post.

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