Contract orders

A contract order is a predefined configuration of order lines that create recurring sales orders periodically for a specific tenure. Sterling™ Order Management System provides configurations to automatically create sales orders or allow a user to manually create them.

The predefined configuration of contract order lines is relevant in a business-to-business (B2B) order operations. Usually, an account manager creates a contract order for the accounts that they manage. An account can have multiple active contract orders at a time. A contract order is always created as a draft that goes through various statuses to allow negotiations on price and delivery timelines before it is confirmed. The other negotiations or approvals can also happen on the contract order lines, which result in status changes such as Proposed, Rejected, Approved. All the statuses that are in between the created and confirmed statuses are optional. The account manager can customize the statuses as needed for their business. When the contract order negotiations are complete, the contract order is manually confirmed. To confirm a contract order, either every contract line must have a price, or the contract order must have a pricelist to derive the price for the products on the contract order lines. A pricelist in Sterling Order Management is defined with a set of standard prices for products in the catalog.

An account manager can create a sales order either automatically or manually only from a confirmed contract order. The sales order then follows the regular fulfillment process when created from a contract order.