| Hewlett Packard's Order Clearing EXpert system (OCEX) has
successfully improved correctness and completeness of customer
orders, since 1988. OCEX provides an order quality assurance
check between HP's ordering system (ORBIT), which delivers
electronic orders to OCEX and production systems in use in
manufacturing divisions. OCEX controls, verifies and improves
the handling of orders by quickly determining errors or mistakes
in customer orders, as they are cleared. OCEX is now in use
by nine major divisions, in almost as many countries.
Completed orders are cleared by OCEX in batch or online modes
before being passed to the relevant manufacturing divisions.
OCEX ensures that all sub-components for a product are present
in the order and that no incompatibilities between them exist.
Order clerks are responsible for maintaining the product
rules, which are formulated in a dedicated language, to specify
product configurations and their manufactured components. Product
components are grouped into a hierarchy of options and option-sets,
which together comprise to form a product. Country specific
and globally available products or options are also handled.
OCEX is build based on IF/Prolog. OCEX uses JAM as its graphics
front-end, which runs on standard terminal screens. A simple
C interface enables JAM to pass and receive information to and
from IF/Prolog.
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