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.