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15-day Public Review for FFM Integration Interface Specification V1.0

The OASIS Field Force Management (FFM) TC members [1] have produced an updated Committee Specification Draft (CSD) and submitted this specification for 15-day public review:

Field Force Management Integration Interface Specification Version 1.0
Committee Specification Draft 02 / Public Review Draft 02
09 July 2012

Specification Overview:
This document describes the Field Force Management Integration Interface (FFMII). FFMII provides a flexible interface between Enterprise Resource Management System (ERMS) and Field Force Management System (FFMS).

The role of ERMS is to take a holistic view at work scheduling and resource allocation from the corporate point of view. For this purpose it needs to manage individual units of work performed without strong supervisory guidance (Field Work) in a way aligned with the business objectives of the company. The role of FFMS is to communicate with available set of workers (Field Force) and to provide individual workers (Assignees) performing Field Work with technical means of accessing information about and sending feedback on work assigned to them. While ERMS defines the structure, content and resource allocation of dispatched work, FFMS is responsible for communicating that information to the field and enforcing any specified constraints on user provided feedback.

For facilitating structured communication between ERMS and FFMS in heterogeneous scenarios, FFMII defines flexible mechanisms that enable Work Request modeling (data content, workflow), exchange, work history collection, and collection of data from the field. Information carried with work requests, work request structure (work-flow, schedule) and data to be collected can all be defined dynamically ‘as data’. This data driven architecture makes FFMII very flexible and adaptable to numerous industries. Additional FFMII capabilities include Field-Initiated Requests that facilitate structured requests and reporting information outside the usual work flow, such as reporting absence, requesting additional work, or providing a sales lead. Reference Data Management provides means to establish custom data repositories with arbitrary content. This enables e.g. input value selection, content validation, or delivery of documents to Field Force. Furthermore, flexible Integration Topologies are supported. Further flexibility is provided by scalability of FFMII itself: Basic features of FFMII are mandatory, and some features are optional. This allows both simple basic implementations and a range of more complete implementations.

Public Review Period:
The public review starts 1 August 2012 and ends 16 August 2012. The specification was previously submitted for public review [2]. This 15-day review is limited in scope to changes made from the previous review. Changes are highlighted in the diff-marked PDF file included in the release package.

This is an open invitation to comment. OASIS solicits feedback from potential users, developers and others, whether OASIS members or not, for the sake of improving the interoperability and quality of its technical work.

URIs:

The complete package of the prose specification document and related files are available in the ZIP distribution file at:

https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/46595/FFMII-Specification-v1.0-csprd02.zip

Additional information about the specification and the Field Force Management (FFM) TC may be found at the TC’s public home page:

http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/ffm/

Comments may be submitted to the TC by any person through the use of the OASIS TC Comment Facility which can be located via the button labeled “Send A Comment” at the top of the TC public home, or directly at:

http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/comments/index.php?wg_abbrev=ffm

Comments submitted by TC non-members for this work and for other work of this TC are publicly archived and can be viewed at:

http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/ffm-comment/

All comments submitted to OASIS are subject to the OASIS Feedback License, which ensures that the feedback you provide carries the same obligations at least as the obligations of the TC members. In connection with this public review of Field Force Management Integration Interface Specification Version 1.0, we call your attention to the OASIS IPR Policy [3] applicable especially [4] to the work of this technical committee. All members of the TC should be familiar with this document, which may create obligations regarding the disclosure and availability of a member’s patent, copyright, trademark and license rights that read on an approved OASIS specification.

OASIS invites any persons who know of any such claims to disclose these if they may be essential to the implementation of the above specification, so that notice of them may be posted to the notice page for this TC’s work.

========== Additional references:

[1] OASIS Field Force Management (FFM) TC
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/ffm/

[2] Public Reviews:
30-day public review, 29 May 2012: https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/tc-announce/201205/msg00014.html

[3] http://www.oasis-open.org/who/intellectualproperty.php

[4] http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/ffm/ipr.php
http://www.oasis-open.org/policies-guidelines/ipr#s10.2.3
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