Get to Know Product Management Challenges
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explain the common challenges of managing a product catalog.
- Summarize how Industries Enterprise Product Catalog (EPC) solves the challenges.
The Start of Something Great
Devi Jacob is in a great mood. It’s Friday, it’s sunny outside, and his coworker brought a batch of delicious homemade cookies to the office. These certainly are welcome developments, but he’s happy for a different reason.
First, a little backstory. Devi is a product designer at Infiwave, a communications service provider (CSP). He oversees a large collection of product listings, including phone, cable, and internet services, and mobile devices and other hardware. On a typical day, he creates and modifies product entries, assigns prices and promotions to offers, and checks the technical catalog. He has to make sure that the order management team has the components necessary to fulfill product orders.
Devi loves his crucial role in the sales process. However, keeping tabs on all these moving product parts overwhelms him sometimes, especially when using his current product-management system, which relies on numerous spreadsheets and disconnected applications.
Room for Improvement
Over the past few months, Devi’s encountered frequent challenges while managing the product catalog data.
- Slow time to launch: It takes ages to get products to market. Devi must configure each offer one at a time without standards for data entry. Sometimes his reports are inaccurate because they contain missing or duplicate information.
- Multiple data sources: There’s no single source of truth for product definitions at Infiwave. His catalog software doesn’t communicate well with the company’s order- management, inventory, customer-data, and marketing systems. This sometimes leads to incomplete, inaccurate, and undeliverable orders.
- Tedious quoting: On the sales side, quote creation is cumbersome because product pricing and other data isn’t always up to date.
- Inconsistent data: Product bundles are difficult to package and maintain under the current system. Devi must regularly update product information and pricing to maintain consistency across bundles. He often deals with inconsistent or duplicate metadata due to the lack of data standards.
- Pricing headaches: Ada Wilson, who handles pricing, wants to introduce new, complex pricing models and product bundles. Unfortunately, the current system offers little in the way of advanced pricing features or the ability to easily target specific customers or groups with custom offers.
- Faulty orders: Devi often receives complaints from his colleagues on the fulfillment side that incorrect order data is causing shipping delays.
In a nutshell, Devi struggles to get products to market fast enough to react to industry shifts and new competition. On top of all this, he recently learned that the numbers are down for both new orders and customer retention. And he’s certain that the catalog issues are to blame. In short, things aren’t going so great at Infiwave.
The Road to Success
With so many challenges, why Devi's good mood? Well, in between bites of a world-class chocolate chip cookie, he opens an email from his boss. Devi’s request to migrate catalog data to Salesforce Industries Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) is approved, and this includes a new license for Industries Enterprise Product Catalog (EPC).
A wide smile grows across his face, and he can already imagine his unbridled amusement and his coworkers’ bewilderment as he skips down the hallway in the near future. This is because Devi knows he’ll soon be working with EPC, an important partner to CPQ.
EPC is a powerful, flexible tool for creating, modifying, and maintaining products and prices. It serves as a single source of truth for product and service data used across Industries CPQ. With EPC, Devi can finally achieve product designer superstardom and give his customers, sales reps, and fulfillment specialists the comprehensive, digital product catalog they deserve.
There’s a ways to go before celebratory hallway skips, so Devi must start training up on EPC to get familiar with all the useful features. Onward to Trailhead! But first, maybe just one more cookie…