Participant modeling

The business entities that participate as trading partners with an enterprise in the supply chain are referred to as participants.

Participants can be given different roles. Example for participants include Enterprise, Buyer, Seller, Node or a Warehouse, Manufacture, or Carrier. Each role that is defined for a participant gives it a certain set of abilities and attributes.

There are many related business entities that play a role in the fulfillment process. These business entities have relevant business information associated and have various relationships to each other. The definition of these business, their operational attributes and their specific relationship with other each is Participant Modeling. Each business entity is modeled as an Organization and assigned one or more such roles such as enterprise, buyer, seller and/or physical node (store or DC). The core of these organizations is the Enterprise, which represents a business entity such as brand, geo, and so on with a unique fulfillment process and business rules. For each organization, users that interact with the system, such as customers, CSRs, and Business Administrators can be defined. Access to user interface functions and data can be controlled for each user (or group of users). For example, a business administration user can be defined to only have access to managing the catalog or a CSR can be defined to have access to a particular set of customers and associated orders.