Enterprise Class Structure

Organizations often operate across multiple products, regions, channels, and customer segments. For example, an electronics retailer might sell mobile devices and laptops through physical stores, online marketplaces, and social media channels while serving customers in different countries. To support these operations, the retailer must manage products, channels, customer data, and compliance requirements that vary by jurisdiction.

On some application development platforms, organizations address this complexity by creating separate applications for each product, region, or channel. Others attempt to manage all variations within a single application. Both approaches can become difficult to maintain and scale as business needs evolve.
Pega Platform™ helps organizations align application design with the structure of the business. By organizing applications around business dimensions, Pega Platform makes it easier to reuse common policies, processes, and rules while supporting variations across products, regions, channels, and customer segments.

Pega Platform supports this approach through the Enterprise Class Structure (ECS), a hierarchical class model that promotes organization, reuse, and scalability. You can share any Rule you place in an ECS layer across multiple applications, reducing duplication and improving consistency. As business operations change, you can adjust existing ECS layers to support new requirements. ECS also reinforces best practices for reuse and standardization as applications expand to additional lines of business. Typically, a lead system architect (LSA) designs the ECS. 

You can share any Rule placed in an ECS layer across multiple applications. You can adjust existing ECS layers as business operations change. ECS also enforces best practices around reuse and standardization as the system expands to other lines of business.

Match the numbers to the following image to learn more about ECS Layers:

1. Implementation Layer: The Implementation Layer contains one or more applications customized for a specific division or line of business. For example, a clothing retailer consists of two brands of stores. Each brand can create its own Implementation Layer for brand-specific assets, such as styling and policies.

2. Unit Layer: If you enable the Division Layer, you can optionally enable the Unit Layer, which contains assets used on a unit-wide basis.

3. Division Layer: The Division Layer is optional and contains assets used on a division-wide basis. Assets in the Division Layer may apply to a line of business, region, or brand. For example, you save a Service-Level Agreement (SLA) Rule that defines the expected response time to a customer complaint in the Division Layer to enable all applications within that division to use that SLA Rule. 

4. Organization Layer: The Organization Layer contains the assets that are used on an enterprise-wide basis. For example, access to an external customer database is an integration point that you can add to the Organization Layer.

5. Pega Platform Layer: The Pega Platform Layer contains the built-in assets necessary for processing Cases and other work in Pega Platform applications. This Layer also includes the assets that Pega Platform uses.

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This Topic is available in the following Module:

• Creating a Pega Platform application v7