RE: [ubl-dev] Applicability of 'Forwarding instructions' in theabsence of an ordering context

[Fulton Wilcox <fulton.wilcox@coltsnecksolutions.com>]

Jan,

The answer depends on the rental company's system solution architecture. If
as usually is the case it is a "star" configuration, UBL fits (possibly but
not necessarily with the need to tweak data field usage.)

Typically, a car rental company will have an integrated rental management
system, which manages the rental process itself, tracks available to rent
inventory and performs a multitude of fleet management functions. The
integrated rental management system is in effect the "star."

The many external interactions are rays from the star. For example, the
rental company's work orders for maintenance, its potential interaction with
electronic highway toll systems, interactions with global reservation
systems and interactions with agents (if its agents have their systems) all
would be "rays" to/from the central star. Integration of the data exchanged
- e.g., a maintenance work order for an automobile also removes that
automobile from the "available to rent" list - would happen within the
rental company's rental management system.

Your example is yet another "ray." 

In effect, the rental customer concludes the rental by telling the rental
company that he or she is done with the car and where to pick it up. At
least provisionally, the rental customer's transaction is already concluded.
That is, absent some pathological situation (e.g., the vehicle is in fact on
a freighter to some other country or is parked on its roof), the customer's
obligation is completed (although not verified).

As you describe, the rental company sends an order to a third party to pick
up a vehicle at a particular address. The transaction is atomistic - the
company doing the pickup has a simple role: pick up the vehicle and deliver
it to a rental company site, with the third party having no commercial
relationship with the rental customer. Presumably, when the company doing
the pickup delivers the vehicle back to the rental company's site, some
rental company person checks the vehicle and scans or keys its return into
the rental company's central system. 

The rental car company's central systems "sun" does its work when the
vehicle is scanned in at its location. For example, it closes out the
customer's rental contract, perhaps triggers final invoicing/credit card
charges, closes out the pickup company's transaction, and sets in motion
processes to pay the company doing pickup.

Presumably, the rental company has standing contracts with the company or
companies performing pickup. Absent eBusiness automation, today the rental
car company probably calls, faxes or emails an order to the pickup company,
and therefore a UBL order should be an appropriate upgrade. The rental
company may also want a UBL invoice from the pickup company as opposed to
self-invoicing, if pickup charges are variable case-by-case rather than some
flat rate by zone, etc.

Odds are that many of the "rays" from the rental car company central systems
sun can be implemented as UBL transactions or as choreographed combinations
of UBL transactions.

						Fulton Wilcox
						Colts Neck Solutions LLC

















-----Original Message-----
From: Jan Algermissen [mailto:algermissen1971@mac.com] 
Sent: Sunday, February 17, 2008 11:15 AM
To: ubl-dev@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [ubl-dev] Applicability of 'Forwarding instructions' in the absence
of an ordering context

Hi,

(thanks so far for the thoughful responses, I'll reply to those later)

I have a use case from the car leasing domain and have a question  
regarding the applicability of UBL.

The use case is taken from the car remarketing part of the leasing  
domain: when a leasing contract ends, it is (at least in Germany)  
comman practice for the leasing customer to drop of the car at some  
location (e.g. her home address) and inform the leasing company that  
the car can be picked up.
The leasing company will then issue a request to some third party  
transport service supplier to pick up the car and deliver it to the  
company's used car parking lot.

For the collaboration between the leasing company and the transport  
service provider I would like to apply UBL processes and documents  
but I am not sure

- whether UBL's processes are applicable at all
- whether the request to the transport service supplier is an offer  
or a forwarding request
- how to best go about extending the appropriate document to provide  
the transport parameters to the
   service provider (location, vehicle plate number,  time of pick up  
etc.) - this seems like a general
   issue when ordering services, ...yes?

There are about half a dozen other processes in the remarketing  
domain (many of them service requests)....should I generally try to  
extend the UBL or is the use case domain so different that I should  
make up my own processes and documents (maybe reusing UBL components)?

What about other areas of logistsics (coordination of service  
providers) - is UBL intended to fit or has this never been considered?

Thanks for help,

Jan




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