The 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…
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.
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
Paul, thanks
I will be very happy to discuss the new ORCH here, looking forward for your post after the Christmas … enjoy
Cheers, Mohamed
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
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
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.
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
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
BE4 is already there as per the thread
AC , AF are not there …
They should be there for an AFF cust , right ?
Cheers
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
For download info, see the TIBCOmmunity thread
AC, AF and BE4 are downloadable from the download site as per usual…
Cheers
Hi Mohamed – yes it is and GA is today…
Cheers
Hey Paul,
Will it be available for download from download.tibco.com , like normal products? and when is the GA ?
Cheers,
~M