Dive Into Change Management
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Summarize the importance of change management in product design.
- Describe how versioning works in Enterprise Product Catalog (EPC).
- Explain the purpose and benefits of using product lifecycles in EPC.
- List and describe the typical stages in a product’s lifecycle.
Product Evolution
Devi has now seen how an initial mapping of products in the catalog guides the development in Shared Catalog. But, let’s be honest. Infiwave won’t be selling the same products forever. Inevitably, the company will modify catalog items to adapt to sales and marketing initiatives, changing customer preferences, and new technologies. It’s all part of managing the product lifecycle.
Devi also has to retire products when they reach the end of their lifespan and replace them with sparkly new ones for Infiwave to stay competitive.
To cater for evolving products, it’s important to have a catalog change-management strategy in place. With an EPC license, Devi has tools for product versioning and lifecycle management at the ready.
Product Lifecycles
As a product modeler, another aspect of change management that you need to consider is how to manage the product lifecycle. A product lifecycle is the length of time that a product is on the market before it’s eventually made unavailable to customers.
Lifecycle Stages
Typically, the lifecycle of a product consists of five phases.
Let’s learn more about each stage.
- Ideation: Marketing teams develop an early conceptualization of the product based on market analysis and business goals.
- Product Configuration: The product designer configures a detailed specification.
- Production Launch: The product designer tests the product and then deploys it to production.
- Change Management: Product teams make changes to the product’s configuration to align with new features, capabilities, or characteristics.
- Retirement: At the end of the product’s (hopefully glorious) life, the product designer assigns an end date to the product to discontinue its availability.
Product Versioning
In EPC, you can use an iterative approach to create versions of the following entities and track the changes your team makes to products and their components over time.
- Commercial products
- Object types
- Picklists
Each time you create a new product version, it inherits the configuration of the previous version. This means you don’t have to create new products from scratch. Modify new product versions behind the scenes to avert disruption and keep ongoing orders running smoothly. Then roll out the new version when the time is right. By setting version start and end dates, you can automatically control how long the version is available for purchase.
For example, imagine you need to manage a TV bundle product over time. This diagram shows the iteration of the Home Bundle product as changes to child products take place.
In this example, you introduce the bundle at the beginning of the year and offer a simple combination of TV and internet products. Six months later, you learn that a 4K feature is available. In response, you configure a new version of the TV product with a 4K attribute value and include it as an optional child product in the bundle. Your customers can now choose between either version of the product.
One month later, a firewall product becomes available, so you create another version of the bundle with the firewall as a complementary child product. In addition, the old standard definition TV is no longer supported, so you retire TV Version 1 and exclude it from the new bundle version.
Lifecycle States
A product lifecycle state refers to the current mode or condition of a product entity. In Enterprise Product Catalog (EPC), you can track lifecycles by assigning states to products and components. The default product states are Draft, Released, and Amendment Pending. You also can create custom states to suit your business processes.
Let’s explore each state in more detail.
| Lifecycle State | Description |
|---|---|
|
Draft |
Product versions with a Draft lifecycle state aren’t visible to sales channels or available for purchase by customers. You make any necessary changes to draft versions behind the scenes as you prepare them for release. |
|
Released |
A product version with a Released lifecycle state means that it’s available for sale and orderable in the Cart. Released versions only allow for limited modifications. When you change a product’s status from Draft to Released, EPC validates it to ensure the integrity of any referenced products and their individual selling dates. To eliminate potential errors, you can’t delete a released product, but you can make it inactive. |
|
Amendment Pending |
When you make changes to an Active version, the product’s state automatically changes to a temporary Amendment Pending state. This locks the version and prevents any additional changes. |
Selling Dates
Product selling dates govern when and for how long key milestones, like activation and continuation, take place for a given product or product bundle. Use selling dates to establish selling periods based on the date and duration of product availability.
- Selling Start Date defines when the commercial product can be ordered and sold.
- Selling End Date controls when the product is no longer available for order.
- Fulfillment Start Date sets the date that the product is ready to be fulfilled. By default, this is the same as the Selling Start Date but can be set for a future date.
- End of Life Date specifies when the product is no longer supported.
Here’s how to use these dates to define current, future, past, and retired products.
With versioning and lifecycle management, you’ll have better control over the evolution of your product lines and be ready to adapt to new business needs as they arise.
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