Templates design is a common solution in many Cloud applications. After all, why do you need to reinvent the wheel? This approach is also commonly used in OTM (Oracle Transportation Management). While there are advantages to the template, this approach also have certain drawbacks.
Template Quick Guides
The type of templates will determine how duration of your customer onboarding. You can follow these quick guides in your templates approach.
- Keep your templates to less than 8.
- Look to data auto assignment rules.
- Collect enough masterdata but not too much of it.
- Prefill templates data as much as possible.
- Use API to automate data collection in templates.
- Provide auto validation checks.
Things to Avoid
Templates have some drawbacks which we need to take note and mitigate.
- Do not over invest in your templates. It is a means to an end.
- Templates cover common scenarios. Remember to provide options to templates design.
- If there are a constant increase of your templates, look to refactoring and harmonise your templates.
Using templates in OTM greatly speed up your customer onboarding time. However, templates are just a tool and should not complicate your OTM configuration.
Danny Kwok 