The organization's roles and participant associations

For an organization to function as desired it must be given one or more roles. Each organization is assigned at least one role. A role is a well-defined set of activities that can be performed by an organization.

Each organization performs at least one role. Sterling Order Management System supports the following organization roles:

Buyer

An organization is assigned the Buyer role when it purchases product from the Enterprise or other organizations set up as Sellers.

A Buyer organization can participate with multiple Enterprises, but must assign a primary Enterprise with whom it participates. When it assigns its primary Enterprise, it takes on that Enterprise's inventory and catalog consolidation rules. When it interacts with multiple Enterprises it acts within the boundaries of the individual Enterprise's business rules.

Buyers can configure relationships with Seller organizations as well as Buyer services.

Carrier

An organization is assigned the Carrier role when it provides delivery services between buyers, sellers, and customers. Special services, such as Next Day Air, can be offered dependant on the Carrier. United Parcel Service, Federal Express®, and the United States Postal Service are all examples of carrier organizations.

Carriers can configure the services they provide such as truckload, less-than truckload, and parcel services.

Enterprise

An Enterprise brokers business. Each organization in an organizational structure must be either an Enterprise or designate an Enterprise as its primary Enterprise.

Each Enterprise in a Hub can have many organizations that are assigned many roles.

Note: The Hub also acts as an Enterprise.

Whether or not an entity in a Hub is assigned an Enterprise role depends on the Hub's business model. For example, in the marketplace model, each market might be assigned an Enterprise role. This setup allows each market to be unique with their own product or service handling.

An Enterprise can define organizations that interact within their Enterprise. They can also set up document definitions to be available across all organizations and configure an Enterprise's carrier preferences.

An Enterprise in Sterling Order Management System controls the flow of order and logistics documents and is considered the owner of the various business documents throughout Sterling Order Management System.

An Enterprise defines most of the business rules and fulfillment processes for the orders. In many cases, such as a sales order, the Enterprise may be the Seller organization, and for purchase orders, the Enterprise may be the Buyer organization on the document. In other cases, if a higher level organizational unit wants to control and enforce business rules and document flow of all it subsidiaries, an Enterprise can represent this organizational unit and Seller/Buyer organization would be the subsidiary.

Template

A Template represents an organization that defines the point-of-sale rules, business processes, and configurations for a store or a group of stores. A Template is not a logical organization; rather, it inherits For this reason, an organization that is configured as only a Template cannot define configurations that are applicable for other roles, such as an enterprise. For example, a Template-only organization cannot define users, sourcing rules, or carrier-related configurations. Template organizations are defined in a hierarchy. Child Template organizations can override, extend, or inherit the rules and configuration information defined by the parent Template organizations.

Note: An organization that is used in a store-specific configuration needs to have the Template role only if it overrides an existing configuration. It does not require the Template role in order to inherit a configuration from another organization, or to pass on a configuration.

By default, template-only organizations do not display in the console or in Applications Manager when organizations in "All roles" are requested. To retrieve these organizations, set GetTemplateOrganizations=Y in getOrganizationList.

Hub

The Hub is the central organization around which all the other organizations are built is assigned the role of Hub. There is only one Hub. Typically the Hub is the entity that purchased Sterling Order Management System. The Hub determines what kind of business model is used during configuration, for example, multi-divisional corporation, third-party logistics (3PL), or marketplace.

The Hub has the ability to configure the other organizations that interact with multiple Enterprises and assign their roles. The Hub also determines the document definitions available to all organizations and configures installation-level rules. The Hub can be assigned multiple roles, for example, Hub and Seller.

Node

A Node represents a physical location (for example, a manufacturing plant, small stock room, or warehouse). A node can also play the role of Buyer or Seller.

A node organization is able to see orders for which its parent organization is the buyer, seller, enterprise, ship node, or receiving node.

Node roles are specified as follows:

  • A child Node belongs to a parent organization. It cannot have any child organizations.
  • A Buyer or Seller Node may belong to a parent organization, but it is not required to. It may have child organizations.
    Note: If the organization you are creating participates in one or more Enterprises, you must identify each Enterprise as an associated participant.

Seller

An organization is assigned the Seller role when it sells product to the Enterprise or other organizations set up as Buyers. Sellers can configure payment types, payment rules, and pricing for their organization.

When processing orders, a Seller organization can use the order, planned order, and purchase order process-type pipelines.

A seller organization can only see orders for which it is the buyer, seller or the enterprise.