Central order management on open standards and BPMN

The challenge

Each sales channel ran its own order lifecycle: different states, different exception handling, different integrations to payment and provisioning. Operations, care agents, logistics teams and approvers had no single view, and each new channel added another variant.

What we built

• An order service aligned with TM Forum's product ordering standard as the system of record, with a canonical state machine of 11 coarse states and 28 fine statuses across five lifecycle phases. Allowed actions are computed on the server, so clients are told what can happen next. A transactional outbox feeds webhook and Kafka connectors with per-event delivery logs and signed payloads.
• A process orchestrator on Camunda 8 running a BPMN hierarchy: capture and validate, payment, decision-table-driven decomposition, parallel per-item fulfilment, delivery, activation and completion, with compensation handlers, cancel, amend and hold sub-processes, SLA timers escalating to human task queues, and a returns and refunds process.
• A cross-channel cart service, searchable by customer identifiers, with share links, hand-off history and re-pricing on catalog changes.
• Channel front ends: a consumer storefront, a point of sale and a social-commerce channel for direct messages with a conversational bot.
• A notification hub with template-driven, event-triggered SMS and email and a per-order message history.
• A product catalog service with specifications, offerings, prices, approval workflow and an event hub.
• An admin panel with live orders, process journey view, exception queues and role-based access.

Design principles

"The orchestrator conducts, the order service records": write actions become process messages rather than direct state changes, which keeps the audit trail honest. Shared contract packages carry types and state machines to services and user interfaces alike, and mock boundaries for payment, messaging and provisioning let the platform be demonstrated and tested anywhere.