Identify Commercial and Technical Products
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explain the differences between commercial and technical products in the Industries Shared Catalog.
- Describe the importance of technical product models.
The SKIP resources at Infiwave are quite excited to use Industries Order Management (OM) and explore more about order decomposition. But Fulfillment Designer Greg Cappelli knows they require some more conceptual information before delving deeper into decomposition.
The very purpose of decomposition is to provide a commercial order with the technical information required to fulfill the order through orchestration. This technical information sometimes includes customer-facing services (CFS), resource-facing services (RFS), or attribute values that are not provided by the customer relationship management (CRM) system during order capture. Exploring the difference between a commercial and a technical product makes things clear.
Commercial Products and Technical Products
Check out this illustration that shows how a decomposition relationship maps commercial products to technical products in the Shared Catalog.
In Salesforce Industries Communications, Media, Energy & Utilities (CME), which Industries OM is a part of, a commercial product is any product visible to customers on the shelf or in their cart. A technical product, on the other hand, refers to a virtual product at the backend, which corresponds to the commercial product on the shelf or in the cart. This invisible product retains all the technical information about the commercial product, required for order fulfillment.
Technical products are used to fulfill orders and are often defined by the requirements of the downstream system, such as billing, scheduling, logistics, and other systems required to complete the order fulfillment process. A decomposition relationship defined in the Shared Catalog maps the commercial product with the technical product.
Now, here’s another illustration that highlights the difference between commercial and technical products using Infiwave Phone 10, the company’s newest product.
A customer just placed an online order for an Infiwave Phone 10. That’s the commercial product they need. However, the executives at Infiwave must know specific technical details about the model the customer requires, before shipping it. The technical specifications of the Infiwave Phone 10, along with the color and the storage, ideally constitute the technical product for Infiwave to identify the customer’s exact selection. In other words, a technical product can be anything behind the scenes that's necessary to fulfill an order for a commercial product. That could mean a shipping spec, installation spec, or a variety of other things.
A long discussion, right? But Greg feels the SKIP resources must also be familiar with a technical product model in the Industries Shared Catalog, before starting with the decomposition process flow.
Infiwave’s New Technical Product Model
Designing product models requires careful consideration, and Greg reiterates this for the SKIP resources. To ease their understanding, Greg refers to Infiwave’s new Back to School Student Offer product model. This product model includes commercial and technical product entities and has been prebuilt into your training playground except for some key entities that you create later in this module.
Study this diagram closely to learn about the various components of the Back to School Student Offer product model. You’ll refer back to this model as the learning progresses. Notice that this offer bundles a Home Internet Solution and Back to School Backpack.
If a customer calls Infiwave to purchase its Back to School Student Offer, here’s how the flow goes.
In the Shared Catalog, where the product offer is configured, the Home Internet Solution has three offerings bundled together: DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) service, Home Hub Modem, and installation.
So, the customer first requires a Home Internet Solution that can ensure broadband connection for their devices. Sometimes, they even require a modem on-site. However, order fulfillment requires more technical details about the modem, and other associated devices, such as:
- The distance of the installation site from the local loop distribution point for the DSLAM (Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexer) port type.
- The broadband speed that the customer requires.
- The devices’ manufacturer, model, wireless protocol, and range.
Defining all these requirements during product modeling helps Industries OM and its associated systems to work seamlessly toward order fulfillment.
Moving On
In this unit, you learned about the differences between commercial and technical products. You also learned about the importance of technical product models in the context of order management. Follow along as Greg explains how to create technical products using the Product Designer, in the next unit.