Figure C.01 - Customer as a Type of Party Role

Customers are at the center of any enterprise.  Without customers at some point in its like, an enterprise cannot exist.  Within the SID model, quite a bit of what is normally thought of as customer data resides within the Party business entity.  This data includes attributes that describe individuals and organizations, such as name, address, phone, fax, email, and other contact information. More specifically, the role object model is used to abstract the notion of a “customer” into a specific subclass of PartyRole, which is documented in GB922 Party Guide Book. This is shown in Figure C.01 below.<br/>This makes the Customer model inherently extensible. Customers can be conceptualized as an Individual, a group of people, or an organization. By making Customer a subclass of PartyRole, the SID avoids “hard-wiring” specific people or organizations as “customers”. Rather, the SID enables Customer to be one of possibly many roles played.<br/>