Logical 07000 - Core Customer Entities

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Subject Area Concepts

The Logical 07000 - Core Customer Entities subject area is a simplified view of how consumers and customers are represented in ARTS ODM 7.0/7.1.  Its purpose is to highlight the relationships that associate people and organizations with consumer roles and customer conversion states.  ARTS uses a generalized structure to represent people and organizations built around the Party entity type.

A Party is a person or organization that interacts with the retailer.  In the ARTS data model the nature of interaction is modeled as a PartyRole.  The PartyRole characterizes the nature of a relationship between a retailer and the parties it interacts with. PartyRole allows one Party (and all of its owned attributes and dependent entity types) to play different parts in their interaction with the retailer.  A Party may play the role of a consumer, a supplier, a worker, and many others.  This generalized structure provides an open ended way to organize all of the people and organizations of interest to the retailer.

Consumer represents the role of interest in this subject area.  A Consumer is any person or organization (Party) that buys things.  A Party is associated with the role of a Consumer through the PartyRoleAssignment entity.  The PartyRoleAssignment entity type is the key mechanism used in ARTS to tie people and organizations to roles (see the Party  topic for details).  Consumers, as used here, are of interest to the retailer but may not be customers.  Consumers that have completed a purchase become customers.  Customers in the ARTS data model are consumers that have, by purchasing a product/service, transitioned into a ConsumerConversionState which is what makes them "customers".  The Consumer-Customer Journey topic covers the concept of consumer state transition and customer lifecycle in detail.

Customers that register with a retailer become key customers.  A KeyCustomer entity represents a customer that is individually identifiable by the retailer and has shared contact information so the retailer can share information with them.  A key customer may have one or more CustomerAccounts with the retailer.  In the ARTS data model a customer has to be identifiable and able to be contacted by the retailer before any account relationship can be established which is why there is a mandatory relationship between KeyCustomer and CustomerAccount.