During my experience with other CRM systems, I've seen that the companies
that sell things, have products in their catalog and use some kind of
logistic order called "sales order".

On the other hand, services companies (i.e. telecommunications providers)
have services in their catalog and the business processes do not end when
the services are installed, they can be modified and/or deactivated
afterwards. So a different concept is handled here: "service orders".

I would say there are two main differences between sales orders and service
orders:

(1) There can be different service order types (i.e. installation,
modification, deactivation), while there is just one sales order type
(sale).

(2) The order details in a service order must be replicated to an assets
table to distinguish the order contents (and orders history) from the active
services subscribed by the customer at a moment in time. For an installation
service order, order details are inserted in the assets table; for
modification service orders, they are updated; and for deactivation service
order, assets records are deleted.




It seems Dynamics CRM has been designed for companies that sell products, so
services companies have to model their services as products (because the
ServiceAppointment entity is not enough to support the whole service sale
process -opportunity, quote, order-). We need to handle orders and to store
the current active services for each customer so the standard orders tables
are not enough for us.



Has anybody been in a similar situation? Any suggestion to model this?



Thanks a lot in advance.