Lifecycle and Status Actions

Lifecycle of an Order

An order can be created from scratch, using a standard requirement or it can be generated using approved request items.

Order items can be added or changed while the order is pending. Then it must be approved and after it has been delivered to the vendor it becomes ordered.

When all of the products have arrived at the specified delivery location in the company, incoming of goods is done in which components are created and assigned to a system (stock, desktops…). After this the order is considered completed.

Lifecycle of an Order Item

New order items are created either manually by specifying the requested product type (and/or offer) and quantity; or they are generated on the basis of standard requirements or copied from an existing request or they are generated on the basis of approved request items. In the next step order items are approved and pricing and delivery details are specified.  After approval the order items are ready to be ordered – only the entire order can be ordered, order items cannot be ordered separately. Only then the lifecycle for different order items in an order can be split – each order item can be delivered partially or completely. The order item lifecycle information is maintained by the status attribute.

In some cases an order item may be rejected and approved after some changes have been made to it or it can be cancelled altogether.

Order Status Actions

The status of an order can be changed in several ways - by selecting the appropriate action in the menu or context menu, by selecting the desired status in a status combo box in the editor or (in some cases) using a dedicated action button.

Order status can also change indirectly, by changing the underlying order items. See Dependencies between status of Request and status of Request Items.

Order Status Actions Details

In real-life situations, the transition between individual statues may (and often will) include several tasks. The transition between 'Pending' and 'Ordered' (Order), for instance, may include checking the order for completeness, sending the order and then setting the order status to 'Ordered'. This sequence of tasks could also be looked upon as Order Approval activities.

Field Vendor's Confirmation in the order editor is meant to record any type of order confirmation, depending on the needs of each particular business process. Order confirmation is not considered a status action.

Dependencies between status of order and status of order items

Both order and order item have their status and they influence one another:

• Changing the status of an entire order changes statuses of some or all underlying order items. See 'Order Status Actions Details' above for description.
• Conversely, when status of an order item changes or when an order item is added/deleted, then status of the entire order may be automatically affected:

  Status of Order Items	Resulting Status of Order
  No order item or at least 1 Pending, the rest (if any) Cancelled	Pending (Pending All)
  At least 1 Ordered. All the rest (if any) Cancelled	Ordered
  At least 1 Completed. All the rest (if any) Cancelled	Completed
  At least 1 Completed AND at least 1 Ordered AND all the rest (if any) not Pending	Partially Delivered
  At least 1 Partially Delivered AND all the rest (if any) not Pending	Partially Delivered
  All Cancelled	Cancelled
  Any other case	Undefined

Setting Options

If one of the standard statuses or status transitions is not desirable, it can be disabled using status customization.

Open the 'Status Actions' catalog (you may need to add it to the sidebar), locate the unwanted status action and disable one or all of its preceding transitions.