Maintain Your Industries CPQ Developer Certification for Summer ‘22

Learning Objectives

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

Explain how to access Industries CPQ via the Lightning Web Components (LWC) interface.
Discuss how bulk asset processing enables you to select multiple assets simultaneously.
Share ways that Vlocity Product Designer enables you to create and configure a product, picklist, or object type.
Point out benefits of the Vlocity Product Designer offer specifications feature.

While anyone can earn this Trailhead badge, this module is specifically intended for those who already hold the Industries CPQ Developer certification.

Salesforce Certification

If you’ve earned the Salesforce Industries CPQ Developer credential, you need to complete this module–which includes information about CPQ Developer updates–by the assigned due date to maintain that certification. Another important part of maintaining your credential is ensuring your Trailhead and Webassessor accounts are linked.

Want to learn more about certification? Check out the Industries CPQ Developer credential page in Trailhead for answers to common questions.

Protect the Integrity of Your Certification

The quality of our certification exams and the value our credentials provide are our highest priority. Protecting the security and confidentiality of our exams is essential to providing our customers with credentials that are respected and industry-leading.

As a participant of the Salesforce Certification Program, you’re required to accept the terms of the Salesforce Credential and Certification Program Agreement. Please review the Salesforce certification exam-taking policies in the Salesforce Credential and Certification Program Agreement and Code of Conduct Trailhead Help article for more details.

Salesforce introduced a ton of great feature enhancements over the past several releases. Let’s take a look at some of the more important ones for this release.

Access Industries CPQ via the Lightning Web Components (LWC) Interface

Starting in the Winter ’22 release, Industries CPQ is available in the familiar Lightning Web Components (LWC) interface—just open the Industries CPQ app from your Salesforce App Launcher.

But be prepared for a makeover. The Cart for Industries CPQ has been redesigned and rewritten in FlexCards and LWC. In LWC, you can select Add Products to open the cart from an order or quote from the Industries CPQ app, or from another app, like Sales. You can also open the cart from the Assets tab for an account.

The new LWC interface provides a better user experience and performance for Industries CPQ. It also aligns with Salesforce LWC standards to offer a more intuitive, consumer-like experience. The LWC interface is more responsive than the Angular interface, and calls to backend APIs can be optimized. It all adds up to a better purchasing and sales experience for clients and sales representatives alike.

To use the LWC app, you need to migrate the Industries CPQ datapacks, a process that converts resources to FlexCards. Turn off the level-based cart refresh (LevelBasedApproach) and make the Industries CPQ app visible (use this procedure if you don't have an OmniStudio license enabled).

Select Multiple Assets with Bulk Asset Processing

Get ready for a more efficient workday. Bulk asset processing enables you to select multiple assets of the same (or different) business or service accounts for simultaneous updates. Now, you can select multiple assets to create a quote or order. Then, you’re able to make changes individually or to a group.

Benefits include:

Flexibility—Renew, amend, and cancel assets for multiple subscribers, service locations, and Telco network sites.
Accuracy—Actions on assets are validated in real time and asynchronously.
Scalability—Support asset renewal, amend, move, and disconnect in massive transaction volumes.

The bulk asset update also includes a number of enhancements.

When moving assets to quote or order, asset repricing either maintains recurring pricing or updates the recurring prices based on a pricing plan parameter.
Users are notified when bulk asset processing is complete (or results in an error).

Industries CPQ groups assets based on the offer ID when an order or quote is created, making it easy to update multiple assets. For each group of assets, you can delete the root bundle, add or remove optional child bundles, and update the attributes and fields of the root bundle and child bundles.

After updates for a group of assets are specified, CPQ next creates a job and notifies you that the job is being processed asynchronously. You can then pick the next group of assets for which to specify updates, while CPQ processes the job in the background. When the job is complete, a notification confirms that the changes were made.

Create and Configure a Product, Picklist, or Object Type with Vlocity Product Designer.

Vlocity Product Designer now allows you to create and configure a product, Vlocity picklist, or Vlocity object type, to track changes.

The best part: You can introduce those changes without making them visible to sales channels or other catalog functions. When you’re ready to deploy those changes, just release a specific draft version of the product, picklist, or object type with effective dates and a custom auto-generated version number to sales channels or other catalog functions.

Keep in mind, however, that after you deploy a new version of the product, picklist, or object type, further changes aren’t allowed to that version except for a few fields (check out Lifecycle Status for Objects, Products, Projects, and Picklists for more information). Changes require a new version of the product, object type, or picklist.

Every versioned object supports multiple versions in both draft and released states.

Create a draft version from any version of the product.
Released versions of product specifications, picklist values, and object types are unable to be deleted.
Change a released version of a product specification, picklist value, or object type by creating a new version. Released versions must have a naming scheme, effective dates, and status.

Search for existing product specifications, offerings, picklists, and object types by criteria such as name, description, and version—and search results will pull up all available versions. You can see the draft and released version details. Compare two or more versions to verify changes.

Check out the version history of your product or picklist by clicking Version History. The Versions dialog appears with the version of your product or picklist, the availability dates, and the created date. From the Versions dialog, you can click New Version and create a new version of your product or picklist.

Extend product versioning to your Digital Commerce solution to accelerate product innovation and market responsiveness. With product versioning, sales teams can support and track offer modifications to existing offers without business disruption. With product versioning, you can also modify offers and deploy changes without disruption. This feature is now extended to your Digital Commerce solution.

With product versioning for Digital Commerce, you can now:

Introduce product changes to ongoing transactions without disruption.
Reduce order fallout with version management in CPQ and order fulfillment.
Track and compare product versions. Accurate ordering through the Digital Commerce solution is aligned with periodic product configuration changes.

Product versioning for Digital Commerce supports:

Browse and Search that accurately returns valid product versions driven by current or reference date and time through a URL parameter referencedatetime for all cacheable APIs; the default is currentDate() in GMT.
Enhanced Digital Commerce cache, which includes Populate and Regenerate API cache jobs that are aware of versioned products.
Configuration and Basket operations that accurately capture product configuration and checkout, specific to your chosen product version in the Digital Commerce customer journey.
The Populate API cache job, which contains a new batch job, named Version Info List Generator, that generates the cache for multiple versions of the same product. The job contains information about all versions of the same product and promotion.
Time slices that store information to maintain snapshots of product version configurations at different time intervals.

In the Digital Commerce solution, product offers and child products are cached, which is primarily driven by the catalog definition. With versioning enabled, cache management and jobs are enhanced to cache all versions of an offer structure definition by time-slice to support the browsing of offers, new purchase flow, and change orders.

The Digital Commerce solution supports versioning on the cacheable APIs in the on-platform Salesforce layer. The Digital Commerce APIs leverage the persistent cache in the cached API response table generated either through the cache initialization batch jobs (populate API cache), cache refresh batch jobs (regenerate batches), or data cached during the processing of a cache miss flow.

One catch: Digital Commerce doesn’t support future-dated cache with Versioning enabled, so keep that in mind.

Explore the Vlocity Product Designer Offer Specifications Feature

Product specifications and offers can be simple (stand-alone) or part of a bundle. Offers can be associated with object types or product specifications.

You can configure product specifications and offerings with these settings.

Specification Type—Set what type of specification you’re creating: Offer, Product, Resource, or Service. Configuring this setting is required for offer specifications and to add any child to a product.
Specification Subtype—Select whether the specification is Simple or Bundled. Configuring this setting is strongly recommended but not required.
Product Specification ID—Select the associated product specification. The Product Specification field is available only with simple offers.

Digital Commerce doesn’t currently support Offer Specification—but it will soon, so stay tuned!

Specification Type	Specification Subtype	Product Specification ID
Offer	Simple	Can be associated with a product specification (not resource or service) or an object type, but can’t be associated with both. If an offer is not associated with a product specification, then it’s a blended offer. Cannot have child offers.
	Bundle	Cannot be associated with a product specification but can have an object type. Can have child offers (not child product specifications). Can be virtual (when the offer is a child of a parent offer) or nonvirtual (when the offer is a root product in a bundle).
	Null	For backward compatibility. This is the default, and the offer is treated as a bundle so it can have child offers.
Product Service Resource	Simple	Cannot be associated with a product specification. Cannot have child product specifications (not child offers). Can be a child of a bundle specification. Can refer to an object type.
	Bundle	Cannot be associated with a product specification. Can have child specifications. Can be virtual (though child specifications cannot be). Can refer to an object type. Can be virtual (when the specification is a child of a parent specification) or non-virtual (when the specification is a root product in a bundle).
	Null	For backward compatibility. This is the default, and the specification is treated as a bundle so it can have child specifications.

When you’re configuring products with those settings, however, consider the following.

Type	Restrictions
Associated Specification or Object Type	A product specification can be associated with an offer. An offer can have only one product specification. But a product specification can be associated with multiple offers. A product specification cannot be associated with another product specification.
Bundles	The Specification Type of a parent and a child must match for bundled specifications or bundled offers. An offer can have only child products whose Specification Type is set to Offer. An offer cannot have child product specifications. A product specification can only have child products whose Specification Type is Product. Resource and Service specifications can have only child products that have Specification Type set to the same value as the parent product. To have child products, a product must have a value set for the Specification Type.
Pricing and Promotions	Pricing adjustments and overrides for the products with Specification Type (Offer, Product, Null) are allowed. Pricing adjustments/overrides for the products with Specification Type (Service, Resource) are allowed.