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May 26 2010

Active Fulfillment - dynamic BPM, rules etc
Posted by Paul Vincent

aff-1The TIBCO AFF solution framework has evolved into a product. Or actually 2. These help solve the “business ‘Order to Cash’ problem” otherwise known as “Fulfillment”.

  • TIBCO ActiveFulfillment drives customer order validation and fulfillment processes in a dynamic, automated manner. This reduces manual provisioning processes, improves Customer experience by providing rules-driven order validation and process checking, reduces Order and Provisioning errors, and provides jeopardy management.
  • TIBCO ActiveCatalog is a comprehensive and flexible Product Offering Catalog. ActiveCatalog allows business users to define new product and service offerings using a building block approach, augmented with rule definitions expressing Offer Eligibility and Provisioning Process rules.

ActiveFulfillment embeds the TIBCO BusinessEvents engine as well as TIBCO BPM. ActiveCatalog is based on the TIBCO CIM MDM solution. Some thoughts on these:

  • ActiveFulfillment is effectively a dynamic process management system, with some aspects of case management too (different processes involved over time, process changes driven by events, etc).
  • ActiveCatalog includes cataloging and managing some of the business rules used in product management. Indeed business rule definitions are certainly “master data” in any organisation! This could be a trend…
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13 Comments

  • By Mohamed Shahat, May 27, 2010 @ 05:39

    Hey Paul,
    Will it be available for download from download.tibco.com , like normal products? and when is the GA ?

    Cheers,
    ~M

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  • By Paul Vincent, May 27, 2010 @ 13:59

    Hi Mohamed - yes it is and GA is today…
    Cheers

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  • By Mohamed Shahat, May 28, 2010 @ 05:58

    Hi Paul,
    ActiveCatalog docs are available at TIBCOmmunity, ActiveFulFillment not yet. BE 4.0 is not available yet for Customers with BE 3 license.

    Do you have a clue :)

    Cheers, ~M

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  • By Paul Vincent, May 30, 2010 @ 23:29

    For download info, see the TIBCOmmunity thread :)
    AC, AF and BE4 are downloadable from the download site as per usual…
    Cheers

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  • By Mohamed Shahat, May 31, 2010 @ 01:05

    BE4 is already there as per the thread :)
    AC , AF are not there …
    They should be there for an AFF cust , right ?
    Cheers

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  • By Paul Vincent, May 31, 2010 @ 08:53

    Mohamed - AF and AC are new products, so should represent a recommended upgrade path for many AFF customers, I expect.
    Regarding your own access to AF and AC (or any other TIBCO product on download.tibco.com), I suggest that is something to discuss with your a/c manager!
    Cheers

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  • By aixsurfer, August 18, 2010 @ 22:20

    Hi all, Tibco AFF sounds nice. The achitectural concept seems ok, but well-known european Telcos have decided in their evaluations not to count on Tibco AFF. On of the main reasons is the performance issue. I don’t have any details on this but can you tell me if there is one and what may be the reason for the issue - software bug, implementation concept, ressources, wrong scalability behaviour (horizontal versus vertical…..) etc.
    Thanks in advance.

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  • By Paul Vincent, August 23, 2010 @ 05:56

    Hi Siegfried - would be interested in the source of your data… for sure some of the latest apps are requiring some new components in AFF/AF to hit increasing scale requirements, but nothing much new there. Correction: actually, some components ARE new, and will be announced for BE users in due course :)
    Cheers

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  • By Mohamed Shahat, December 15, 2010 @ 12:10

    Hello aixsurfer,
    I believe the story about AFF is a bit complicated. When you hear the stories about Catalog driven fulfillment for Telcos , i believe TIBCO AFF is one of the earliest realizations for this concept. However, a great attention to the word FRAMEWORK should be given.

    As a fan (of TIBCO) , I’d like the way they are working with it, especially with nice infrastructure components at hand (BW , BE , iPE) however a lot of changes , enhancements, modifications are being done and you should study carefully what you need out of your OM/OF project …

    You need to listen to others who are talking about Providing solutions for OM as well (each with his own angle) , but what matters is the real Customer problems that should be address …

    Cheers,
    Mohamed

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  • By Paul Vincent, December 15, 2010 @ 14:26

    Hi Mohamed - wise words. The latest AF version has an interesting BE-based component that replaces aspects of iPC (iProcess Conductor) for high performance plan handling. Will see about a blog post on that in the coming weeks…

    Cheers

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  • By Mohamed Shahat, December 25, 2010 @ 22:34

    Paul, thanks :)

    I will be very happy to discuss the new ORCH here, looking forward for your post after the Christmas … enjoy

    Cheers, Mohamed

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  • By Mailing Fulfilment Services, March 21, 2011 @ 03:31

    Hi Paul, the Tibco Active Fulfillment system sounds excellent and something that a fulfillment company like our own could really do with taking advantage of.

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  • By Paul Vincent, March 21, 2011 @ 14:05

    Mark - interesting thought. Do you get complex schedules of printing in your business, with many possible changes and issues (eg print job X actually needs color type C it turns out, but printer P is out of schedule until T etc etc etc)? Quite possibly…

    Cheers

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