Create a Technical Product

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Describe Vlocity Product Designer and its features.
  
• Verify a decomposition attribute.
  
• Create an object type using Vlocity Product Designer.
  
• Create a technical product using Vlocity Product Designer.
  

Meet the Vlocity Product Designer

The SKIP resources at Infiwave are eager to follow Fulfillment Designer Greg Cappelli as he introduces them to Vlocity Product Designer.

Vlocity Product Designer is the Shared Catalog app that helps manage all your catalog offerings shared across Industries CPQ, Contract Lifecycle Management, and Industries OM. With Product Designer, you can build product models to fulfill your business requirements, whether they’re simple or incredibly complex, without writing a single line of code. For a refresher on product modeling, check out Industries Product Modelling Basics.

You can use Product Designer to:

• Create picklists, attribute categories and attributes, and object types.
  
• Create new products using attributes, picklists, and object types.
  
• Organize products into bundles and forge product relationships.
  
• Assign prices, promotions, and discounts to create sellable offers.
  

A standard bottom-up approach streamlines the creation of products and product offers in the Product Designer. You start by configuring the smaller components, such as picklists, attributes, and object types, and use them to build multiple products and bundles in your catalog.

To explore these Product Designer components, check out this interactivity. Click each numbered callout to learn more.

For a refresher on the Product Designer, check out Product Designer Basics.

Some of these product entities have been prebuilt into your training playground. Follow along as Greg creates the rest of the entities, and later creates decomposition relationships.

Review a Decomposition Attribute

As you just learned, Greg must create a picklist first and then an attribute that uses the picklist. If you are following along, the picklist and the attribute have already been created in your training playground. To learn more about picklists and attributes, including how to create them, check out Industries Picklists and Product Attributes. And now, it’s time to verify the attribute.

Technically, you create and store all product attributes the same way. But you can categorize them based on their purpose. For example:

• Decomposition attribute: An attribute that technical products use during order decomposition.
  
• Design-time attribute: An attribute that a product manager or architect defines during product creation.
  
• Run-time attribute: An attribute that a customer specifies during order capture.
  

Follow along as Greg reviews the decomposition attribute.

1. From the App Launcher, find and select Vlocity Product Designer.
   
2. From the navigation menu, select Vlocity Attributes.
   
3. On the Vlocity Attributes dropdown menu, select All.
   
4. Search for Modem, and select Modem Standard.
   
5. Review the Modem Standard attribute. In the the Applicable Objects section, notice that the Product2 object is selected. Depending on how the Lightning App Builder is set up, sometimes the label name Product appears in place of the API name Product2.
   
   

If the Product2 Object is not set as the applicable object, the attribute is unavailable to any object type or product.

Create an Object Type

An object type in the Shared Catalog is a reusable entity that defines properties such as fields and attributes, and the layout for all linked products. Object types can help you group products with similar characteristics to ensure consistent behavior and application of rules.

Salesforce recommends that you create all products with object types, and each type of product entity, such as offer, product spec, service, and resource, has a corresponding base object type at the top of the hierarchy.

Here, follow along as Greg creates an object type called Modem CFS Spec, a sub-type of the BASE Service Spec Type object type. The object type houses CFS and RFS technical products.

1. From the App Launcher, find and select Vlocity Product Designer.
   
2. From the navigation menu, select Vlocity Objects and Object Types.
   
3. From the Vlocity Objects and Object Types dropdown, select the Vlocity Objects list view.
   
4. Search for Product2, and select Product2 Object
   
5. In the Object Types section, review the properties of the Product2 object and its objects. Click to expand collapsed sections.
   
6. Notice the Modem V1 object type, which is a sub-type of the BASE Product V1 object type. The Modem V1 object type is for the commercial modem product entities, and you are here to create the corresponding object type for the technical modem product entities.
   
   
7. Click New Object Type.
   
8. Specify these details.
   
   • Name: Enter Modem CFS
   • Parent Object Type: Find and select BASE Service V1
     
   • Version Label: Enter V1
   • Select Active
     
   • Effective From: Select Today
     
9. Click Done.
   

The new object type is created. Now, Greg must verify the details of this object type.

1. Expand BASE Service V1 and notice that the new object type Modem CFS is added now.
   
2. Under BASE Service V1, click Modem CFS to review its details.
   
3. Click the Layout Management tab. The fields visible on the Fields tab are inherited from the BASE Service V1 object type.
   
   
4. Click the Attributes tab to see all the attributes applicable to the Product2 object.
   
5. Search for the Modem Standard attribute, and drag it to the Decomposition Attributes section, under the Layout Management tab. The Modem Standard attribute is now added to the list of assigned attributes and fields.
   
6. Click the Modem Standard attribute to verify the attribute details.
   

With the Object Types defined, Greg moves on to creating the technical products.

Create Technical Products

Next, Greg creates two new technical products: the Home Hub 2000 CFS and the Home Hub 3000 CFS. Later, you use both products to fulfill Home Hub Modem commercial product orders. Review this diagram to understand how these two technical products map to a single commercial product.

In Infiwave’s scenario, the Home Hub Modem’s Grade attribute decides whether a buyer gets Home Hub 2000 CFS or Home Hub 3000 CFS. More about this later.

Now, here’s how Greg creates a technical product Home Hub 2000 CFS.

1. From the App Launcher, find and select Vlocity Product Designer.
   
2. From the navigation menu, open Products.
   
3. Click Create New Product.
   
   

4. In the New Product window, specify these details.
   
   • Product Name: Home Hub 2000 CFS
   • Product Code: T-MOD-2000
     
   • Product Description: Technical product for the Home Hub Modem
   • Object Type: Modem CFS V1
     
   • Specification Type: Service
     
   • Select Active
     
   • Selling Start Date: Today
     
   • Fulfillment Start Date: Today
     
   • Select Orderable
     
5. Save your changes. The new technical product for Home Hub 2000 CFS is created, and its product page opens.
   
6. In the Details tab, locate the Decomposition Attributes section.
   
7. To view or edit the technical product’s attribute metadata, select Modem Standard.
   
8. To see the JSONAttribute populated under the Debugging Properties section, refresh the page.
   

Congratulations! You’ve successfully created the technical product Home Hub 2000 CFS. Now, repeat the steps to create Home Hub 3000 CFS with these details in your training playground.

• Product Name: Home Hub 3000 CFS
• Product Code: T-MOD-3000
  

Up Next

In this unit, you learned how to create technical products using the Vlocity Product Designer. You also delved deeper into various building blocks of a technical product such as picklists, attributes, and object types. Proceed to the next unit to understand how a decomposition relationship works.

Resources

• Salesforce Help: Create Products in the Product Designer
• Trailhead: Product Designer Basics