Complex event processing in order management

Way back, I have seen implementations where complex event processing tools were integrated with provisioning systems to accomplish product catalog/order management.

The solutions involved these steps:

• Decompose CRM order into order line items (pre processors that works in multi threaded mode)
• Associate technical use cases with order lines (build complex rule agendas using RETE rule engine)
• Product translation of CRM product into middle ware products (decompose complex rules into simpler atomic rules recursively using decision manager)
• Generate a fulfillment  plan - sequence and list of integration services to be invoked, dependency between order lines (provisioning flow to be executed determined by technical use cases)
• Execute the fulfillment plan

This solution, perhaps, is adopted realizing the availability of APIs in conventional system to integrate with downstream/upstream. And cost effectiveness if complex event processing and integration product suites are already present in organizations technology stack.

With the advent of dedicated products available for product catalog and order management and growing business complexity, such solutions became obsolete.

Mainly because customers/organizations got to focus on business requirements, with much less efforts needed on the implementation of how technical use case association/product translation happens in background.

This also have been better promising on following enterprise architecture standards and scalability, as data model and hierarchy consistency is been maintained across interacting systems.

This apparently is not the only domain where CEP/middle ware tools based implementations gradually seems to loose value with matured products launched in market.

Decision on this, though, is still function of complexity of implementations and cost of the products.