Business Behavior
How configured Offering Natures select the economic behavior of offerings.
Business behavior
In O2A, what an offering does economically is not decided by an informal label like "product" or "service". Each offering points at a configured Offering Nature — the kind of thing the offering is, for example a subscription, a one-off product, or a usage-metered service. Each Offering Nature carries a business-equation archetype: the rule that describes how the offering's economics behave — how revenue is recognized, how costs accrue, what triggers value movement. The archetype drives the economics; any product-or-service wording only describes the offering.
How It Works
Offering Natures are configured in CA-OFFNAT, the Configuration Artifact that defines the offering natures an organization uses. Business-equation selection is embedded inside CA-OFFNAT as the CA-BUSEQU component — it is not a separate configuration workflow. Each Offering Nature an organization defines selects a single business-equation archetype, and that archetype determines which offering-level economics are active, how Purchase-contract payments are generated, and how the offering's P&L is interpreted. Product or service wording may still appear as descriptive labelling, but it carries no economic behavior.
Statements
The statements below state each rule precisely.
- Offering behavior is driven by a business-equation archetype.
- An Offering Nature selects the business-equation archetype.
- Offering Natures are configured in CA-OFFNAT.
- CA-BUSEQU is the Business Equations component embedded in CA-OFFNAT.
- Product or service labels are descriptive labels; the business-equation archetype drives economic behavior.
Why It Matters
This separation is what keeps commercial behavior predictable and portable. Because behavior is derived from a configured archetype rather than a free-text type, the same offering means the same thing across implementations, and the standard can reject behavior-bearing stand-ins like a PRODUCT | SERVICE switch. It connects Configuration (where Offering Natures live) to the financial and contract pages (where the archetype shapes payments and P&L).