Explore Admin Tasks and Industries Cloud Cache

Learning Objectives 

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

• List the common admin tasks in Shared Catalog.
  
• Describe how caching works in Shared Catalog.
  

Before You Start

Before you start this module, make sure you complete the following required content. The work you do here builds on the concepts and work in the content. 

• Industries EPC Foundations
  
• Industries Shared Catalog
  

Common Admin Tasks in Shared Catalog

Infiwave is a Southwest US–based technology company that offers cable, internet services, mobile devices, and accessories to its customers. Mary Green is the new catalog administrator at Infiwave who strives for seamless functionality. The company recently adopted Industries Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) and hired her to manage the Shared Catalog. She does this by performing technical tasks to ensure catalog information is always up to date and follows company guidelines. She also performs updates and trains her teammates on new functionality as it becomes available.  

Apart from her interactions with the product and pricing team, Mary knows she makes the biggest impact when her work goes unnoticed. After all, her catalog maintenance behind the scenes is geared toward resolving errors and inconsistencies before they present themselves. To get a better understanding of how she can achieve this, Mary is reviewing the necessary tasks to minimize issues for business users and customers. 

Digital product catalogs always require administration and management to function correctly. In the case of Industries CPQ and Shared Catalog, there are a few maintenance jobs that admins must run to keep application data accurate and ensure best performance and faster speeds at run time. 

Industries Cloud Cache

An important aspect of Mary’s work is making sure that product data configured behind the scenes appears accurately at run time in the Cart. As a result, sales representatives and customers view valid and up-to-date product and pricing information during the order capture process. She knows she must maintain the Industries Cloud cache to make this possible.

Caching data is a great technique for optimizing system performance. It’s ideal for situations where multiple transactions require the same product data. This is because caching stores data in an easily accessible place, rather than making the system recalculate or re-retrieve the information from the catalog. By using the cache, you can improve the performance and response time for operations that involve large hierarchical product bundles. 

To learn more about how caching works in Salesforce, visit the Platform Cache Basics Trailhead module. 

CPQPartition

Industries CPQ primarily caches data in a Salesforce platform cache called the CPQPartition. This is created when you first install your Communications, Media, or Energy Cloud. To use it, you must enable it and make sure it has enough space allocated. You can allocate a minimum of 10 megabytes (MB) for the platform cache or a maximum of whatever your Salesforce platform cache limit allows.

Here you can see the CPQPartition usage on the Platform Cache screen in Setup. 

Just like all platform caches, CPQPartition is made up of a session cache and an org cache. Session cache, as the name implies, is the cache space for an individual user session. Communications, Media, and Energy Clouds don’t use this cache. Org cache allows you to cache items by any user across the application. In CPQPartition, the org cache performs this function by storing product hierarchy products as JSON key-value pairs, rules, and line item properties for your entire organization. 

Meet Devi Jacob, Infiwave’s trusty product designer. When he creates a product bundle that contains smartphone and smartwatch child products, the org caches the product hierarchy, including the parent product and the two child products. When sales associates add the product bundle to the Cart, the Cart actually retrieves the product hierarchy data from the cache, and not directly from the product catalog. This saves valuable loading time and helps in closing sales more quickly.

Here’s everything the org cache stores at both design time and run time. 

What’s Next?

In this unit, you learned about the common admin tasks Mary has to perform at Infiwave. You also saw how caching plays an important role in Shared Catalog. Next, you see how to use maintenance jobs to keep the catalog cache running smoothly.