If you’re a consultant or software developer working in the ERP space, you have undoubtedly found yourself having to model a unique business process that’s critical to your operations. However, the system feels like a rigid box—while it might let you add custom fields to existing entities, creating entirely new models or relationships is off the table. It’s like trying to build a complex structure with only a handful of basic blocks. Frustrating, isn’t it?

At Hantera, we’ve been addressing this challenge by using Actors to represent business objects like orders and customers. Actors offer a flexible way to model entities and their interactions within your business processes. For example, our Ticket actor helps manage long-running business transactions seamlessly.

Up until now, if you wanted to extend the data on these actors, you’d likely turn to dynamic fields. Dynamic fields are a powerful feature for adding properties to existing entities, allowing you to customize and enrich your data models without much hassle. They work great for enhancing what’s already there.

But what if you need to go a step further? What if you want to introduce entirely new entities or relationships within your data graph? This is where dynamic fields hit their limits.

Enter Actor Extensions. This new feature allows you to expand the graph itself by adding new entities (nodes) and relationships (edges). How does it work? Some actors can now be “typed”. You start by defining a type for an actor—for instance, a specific type of Ticket. This type is linked to a key and can define new kinds of entities within Tickets of that type. Additionally, these types can introduce new relationships in our Graph, enabling actors to create connections to any other node.

A Practical Example: Modeling Shipments with Extended Actors

Let’s say you want to model shipments within your Ticket actor. With Actor Extensions, you can:

• Collect Shipment Events: Integrate with external Transportation Management Systems (TMS) to gather real-time shipment data.
• Trigger Automations and Rules: As shipment events occur, the Ticket’s state machine can automatically trigger actions—like sending delivery notifications or updating order statuses.
• Monitor Delays Proactively: Use the Portal’s Query engine to monitor for delayed shipments. If a shipment shows signs of trouble, you can address the issue before it impacts the customer.
• Gain Business Intelligence: Analyze average order-to-customer delivery times across different markets and carriers. This data helps you make informed decisions to optimize logistics and carrier selection.
• Streamline Troubleshooting: With comprehensive shipment data at your fingertips, resolving issues with lost or missing packages becomes much more straightforward.

Beyond Collecting Data: Unlocking New Possibilities

Having up-to-date, near real-time data in Hantera opens the door to numerous automation opportunities:

• Automate Customer Communications: Send personalized updates to customers based on shipment statuses or other triggers.
• Integrate Inventory Management: Adjust stock levels in real-time as shipments are processed, keeping your inventory accurate.
• Enhance Returns Processing: Simplify the returns workflow by linking shipment data directly to return authorizations and restocking processes.
• Custom Relationships: Create new connections between different actors—like linking a shipment directly to a customer feedback ticket—to provide a holistic view of customer interactions.

Why Extended Actors Matter

While dynamic fields are excellent for adding properties to existing entities, Extended Actors empower you to reshape the graph itself. You can introduce entirely new entities and relationships, allowing for a more natural and efficient modeling of your unique business processes. It’s like upgrading from a basic set of blocks to a full construction kit—you have the tools to build exactly what you need.

We believe that Extended Actors will significantly enhance how you model and automate your business workflows in Hantera. It’s all about giving you the flexibility to adapt the system to your needs, rather than forcing you to fit into a one-size-fits-all solution.

Feel free to explore this new feature and see how it can transform your operations. You can find detailed technical documentation in the Developer Portal. If you have any questions or need assistance, we’re here to help.


Cover photo by Ali Mkumbwa on Unsplash.