LSO Business APIs enable buyers and sellers of products to automate different stages of the business lifecycle—including product availability and pricing discovery, quoting, ordering, billing & settlement, and trouble ticketing—between their companies.
LSO APIs for business automation improve the user experience by speeding up the flow of information between buyers and sellers, as well as the provisioning of the chosen service, my minimizing or even eliminating manual intervention.
MEF’s open-standard LSO Business APIs are implemented at one or both interface reference points in the LSO Framework—LSO Cantata and LSO Sonata.
LSO Business APIs at the LSO Cantata and LSO Sonata references points automate the following business functionalities:
Each reference point includes supporting detailed business requirements, use cases, developer guides, APIs, and test requirements. Any of MEF’s LSO Product Payloads can be “blended” with these LSO APIs using the LSO Blending Tool in the MEF LSO Marketplace
To confirm that the buyer and seller are referencing the same location in their respective databases. This validation is an important initial step in the business lifecycle, on which several of the following steps build.
Enables the buyer to discover the range of offerings the seller has available at a given site and the pricing for those offerings. This valuable new lifecycle “route” offers an alternative to the classic pre-order single product offering methodology (see next section).
Enables the buyer to discover the availability and price of a specific required product at a given site. This is the classic pre-order single product offering methodology offered as an alternative to the more recently available lifecycle “route” for multiple offerings at a given site (see previous section).
Enables the buyer to place an order for a specific required product at a given site.
Enables the buyer to ascertain from the seller the detailed status of an order already placed with the seller.
Enables the seller to provide the buyer with the invoice for settlement of an order placed by the buyer.
Enables the buyer and seller to open and close trouble tickets and provide incident information.
The LSO APIs at LSO Cantata allow enterprise customers to automate their business interactions with their service provider partners for activities such as quote, order, billing, and trouble ticketing.
The LSO APIs at LSO Sonata allow retail service providers to automate their business interactions with their suppliers/vendors for activities such as quote, order, billing, and trouble ticketing.
The LSO Cantata interface and APIs facilitate interactions between the enterprise (the customer application coordinator) and the business applications’ layer of the service provider’s domain. The interface handles interactions like quoting, ordering, and inventory of the available MEF services standards provided to the enterprise.
Explore LSO CantataThe LSO Sonata interface and its APIs address the business-to-business layer of inter-provider interactions, like quoting, ordering, and inventory.
Explore LSO Sonata