Regions and region schema

Region and region schema are the building blocks for defining geography in Sterling Order Management System.

A region schema represents the complete set of regions that define a specific geographic area.

A region schema consists of a group of hierarchical regions. Each region is itself a set of other regions or a set of zip codes forming that region.

For example, the geographical definition of the USA could be:

• A region USA consisting of 50 other regions - the 50 states.
• Each state could consist of a varying number of regions - the counties in the state.
• Each county could consist of cities or towns.
• Each city and town could be defined by the set of postal codes that it includes.

Sterling Order Management System provides a hierarchical way of defining regions so that aggregate regions could be defined easily and with the least amount of data entry.

Sterling Order Management System has a broad functional footprint and sometimes a single way of defining and dividing geography may become very limiting. For example, how territories are defined for shipping may not be the same as required for providing installation services. For reasons like this, Sterling Order Management System allows definition of as many Region Schemas as required. Organizations can then associate the right Region Schema for each of the following purposes:

• Shipped Product Region Schema - for purposes of shipping, very broad regions can be defined which divide a country or region into additional regions. These regions can then be associated with shipping nodes from where the product is shipped to the destination.
• Delivery Region Schema - for purposes of providing delivery services, a more granular region definition is desired to the level of cities or towns and in some cases even sections of a city.
• Provided Service Region Schema - as with delivery services, a more granular region definition is desired for this purpose. However, the way the geography is divided might not be the same as it is for a Delivery Region Schema definition.
• Analytics Region Schema - for purposes of Data Warehouse Analytics.
• Selling Region Schema - for purposes of providing different product pricing and entitlements for different regions.

Currently, region schema definition can be done only by the Hub (DEFAULT) organization. Enterprises can select the appropriate schema from the list of schema's that the hub has created. Sterling Order Management System provides a basic schema definition for the United States (US) as an optional default setup. You can use this as a starting point for your schema definitions.

While region schemas can only be defined at the Hub level, they can be associated at the resource pool level. If a region schema is associated at the resource pool level, it serves as an override to the region schema at the provider organization level.

Since in any given schema, a large number of regions could be defined, the concept of region level is introduced to allow better manageability. Region level classifies regions into distinct categories to facilitate easier searches later. Examples of region levels would be "State", "City", and so forth. Region level also helps to prevent data entry errors. One-time setup defines what "level" can be a child of which "level". This helps in prevention of data entry errors such as adding a "State" to a "City" inadvertently.

Extending Sterling Order Management System to include custom ZIP code and region data

You can extend the optional SQL data that is provided out of the box with Sterling Order Management System to include custom ZIP code and region data. For more information, see Updating additional SQL data.