Order Management organizes configuration parameters and settings into logical sets called providers, which are related to particular business processes or functions. By default, the system includes the following providers:
You can also see other providers, depending on which services have been provisioned to you.
Item inheritance hierarchy
The providers defined in an Order Management instance are structured hierarchically, and referred to as the Item Inheritance Hierarchy. The provider settings at a specific level or node are inherited by any child level that doesn't have its own definition for that provider. The Item Inheritance hierarchy, from top to bottom, is as follows:
Providers at the company, catalog, or site level are defined in a Provider Manager. Providers at lower levels are defined as part of the element associated with each level.
When you have defined a provider, you can save it to a provider profile, then apply that profile to other providers. Profiles make it easy to manage multiple providers that use the same settings.