Explore Offer Creation in Product Designer
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explore the standard offer creation process using Product Designer.
- Describe the TeleManagement (TM) Forum approach to offer creation.
Choosing the Right Approach
Devi, the product designer at Infiwave, knows he has a powerful, flexible, and easy-to-use catalog builder in his hands. He starts planning a typical Infiwave catalog offering using Product Designer. Devi can create the catalog offering in one of two ways.
- Standard offer creation approach
- The TM Forum approach.
Follow along as Devi explores both approaches.
Standard Offer Creation Process
In the standard offer creation process, Devi starts by configuring the most granular building blocks: picklists and attributes. He then includes these blocks or components in metadata templates, called object types. From there, he defines products by setting them to inherit the information contained within the object type or subtype. When he’s ready to bring the product to market, he applies a price to it from a price list to create a sellable offer.
Easy enough, right? We now delve a little deeper into each step and learn more about these components.
Picklists
A picklist is a selectable list of values that your customer can use to define certain characteristics of a product in the Industries CPQ Cart. For example, a customer selects the color for their smartphone product from a picklist that contains options such as Black, Blue, and Purple.
You can reuse picklists across several attributes and object types and they can hold text, number, Boolean (true or false), date, or datetime data types.
Attribute Categories and Attributes
Attributes are the characteristics of a product or a set of products. For a phone product, you could include attributes like storage capacity, size, brand, and operating system. Here’s a configuration screen for an Upload Speed attribute. Using the Value Type and Picklist fields, this product attribute is connected to an Upload Speed picklist.
When you connect an attribute to a picklist, you enable customers and sales reps to define the value of the attribute in the Industries CPQ Cart. In CPQ lingo, we call this a run-time attribute. Of course, sometimes you would want to define the value of some attributes behind the scenes because they have only one option. For example, Devi sets the Brand attribute of all phone products to Infiwave. In CPQ, we call this a design-time attribute.
Attributes hold special functionality. For example, by using attribute-based pricing rules, you can automatically change a product’s price based on the value of its attributes.
In the Shared Catalog, attributes are grouped into attribute categories. Before creating attributes, you must create their associated attribute category.
Object Types
An object type is an internal classification that lets you define the schema and architecture of a particular category of catalog items. When you create an object type, you organize attributes, fields, and picklists into layouts and sections on an object type. Then, you can use that object type repeatedly to configure similar products. This ability to quickly apply metadata to products dramatically speeds up the offer creation process.
This configuration screen shows the layout of fields and attributes for a Handset object type.
Further, you can create variations or subtypes that inherit the information and layouts of a primary object type and include distinctive entities to support unique offerings. For example, in the object type hierarchy, Handset is a subtype of a Device object type. This means that Handset contains all the Device fields and attributes, plus a few extra Handset-specific attributes.
Products and Product Bundles
Lastly, you create either simple or bundle products and apply the associated object to them so they inherit the metadata. At this point, you can define values for design-time attributes to shape the characteristics of the product. You can also add files or images as attachments to the product. The final step of offer creation is to assign a price from a price list to the product. Also, if needed, assign any attribute or context rules to the product to control how it’s sold in the CPQ Cart.
If you’re creating a product bundle, you can define its child products by using the Structure tab. The tab shows the bundle configuration and the type of relationship between each product. In the following example, a Holiday Offer Bundle contains three child products: a phone, a data plan, and a protection plan.
You’ve just learned the standard process for offer creation in Product Designer. It’s time to test your knowledge. Select an item from the list to complete the statement.
TM Forum Approach to Offer Creation
Use Product Designer to suit your business needs or industry standards. For our friends in the communications industry, we recommend using specification (spec) types to designate products, offers, resources, and services. These entities align to the TM Forum Shared Information-Data (SID) model and adhere to best practices of communications catalog management.
A spec is an instance of a product, service, or resource record that inherits the attributes, fields, layouts, and sections defined in an object type or subtype. Specs include all the necessary information associated with a catalog offering. Specs generally don’t have an assigned price.
After you’ve developed a product spec, you use it to create another spec type, called an offer. Offers represent reusable commercial products that are ready to be sold to customers. The offer inherits the metadata from the product spec, similar to how it would from an object type.
After you’ve created the offer, you assign pricing information to it to make it available for sale in CPQ Cart. This decoupling of product and price allows for flexibility in how you configure offers to attract customers. In Enterprise Product Catalog (EPC), the spec-to-offer process is known as offer realization.
Smartwatch Example
Devi decides that building out Infiwave’s newest smartwatch product offering, the Infiwatch 5, is a good starting point. What would this process look like?
Help Devi by putting the steps in the correct sequence. When you’re done, click Submit to check your work. If you want to start over, click Reset.
Onward and Upward
Devi’s now well versed in the Product Designer workflow, but he knows it’s really just the beginning of what Shared Catalog can do. After he’s configured a product or offer, he can create complex bundle configurations, promotions, and discounts, set custom rules to control pricing, and much more. There’s so much to do and Devi knows he can do it with Product Designer by his side. He smiles to himself and goes for his coffee break.