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The C3 Product Manager provides a central location for creating, maintaining, and managing product information in the Comergent eBusiness System. CHAPTER 10, Product Administration describes the tasks associated with managing the product catalog.
The basic structure of the Comergent product catalog consists of product categories and products. A product category is a collection of products with similar attributes. A product identifies a uniquely purchasable item within a category. Each product has a unique product ID: this must be unique in the Comergent eBusiness System. Some characters are not allowed in product IDs. See Product Administration Tasks for more details.
When you create a product, you can assign the product to an appropriate category, or create the product unassigned (to be assigned later). You can also nest a category within another category. The Comergent eBusiness System allows products and categories to exist at the same level, as shown in Figure 7. You can:
The guidelines for a reasonable product catalog are:
You can create products either as assigned to parent categories or as products unassigned to a category. Therefore, it is best to begin the process by creating product categories and the product category hierarchy. To Create a Product Category describes the process.
Once you have created the categories, you are ready to create the products for your catalog. There are two ways to do this. One way is to import product categories and products into your catalog from an outside source as described in Importing Products. During the import task, you will select the root category for the imported product categories and products.
The other method of creating products is to follow the process in To Create a Product. When you create the product (either assigned to a parent category or as unassigned), you define effectivity dates for the product, units of measure, and so on. You can designate the type of product (normal, configurable, assembly, and aggregated) and you can also assign features to the product.
In Release 6.0 and higher, subsequent to creating a product within an initial category, you can assign a product to multiple categories. See To Assign or Remove Products. |
Products in your implementation of the Comergent eBusiness System can have a life cycle in which they are first created and prepared by administrators, then released so that they can be bought by customers, and then at the end of their life made unorderable. This release of the Comergent eBusiness System enables you to manage product life cycles using the product status field. This can take the following values:
Typically, you create a product with the In Creation status so that you can ready it for release without it being available to end-users until you are ready to release it. Once you have moved a product from the In Creation status to one of the other statuses, then you cannot move it back. You can delete products while they have this status.
The main use for the Blocked status is to prevent end-users from buying the product. You can move a product to the Blocked status, and then subsequently delete the product once you have processed any current orders that contain the product. You can delete products while they have this status.
Certain products are only meaningful in the context of a main item being purchased. For example a five-year warranty should only be purchased as a component to a configured solution. In previous releases of the Comergent eBusiness System, these products could be added as main items. In Release 7.0.1 and higher, you can check a box when you create a product that identifies the product as not sellable as a separate item, that is, the product can be added as a component of a configurable product or a line item in an assembly, but cannot be sold separately. If this box is not checked, then the product can be added as a component and can be sold as a separate item as well.
You can specify that a product is a service product. In most respects, service products behave as most products do, but there is one difference when a service product is configurable. It depends on the setting of the Use Configuration Prices for Service Products? business rule as follows.
When you create a model for a configurable product, you can price option items in the model in one of two ways: either by associating a product with the option item, and pricing the corresponding product using price lists, or by attaching a price to the option item directly. See Working with Display Properties for a description of how prices can be set for models, option classes, and option items using the Price display property.
When you configure a product, the underlying model may get prices for items from the C3 Pricing engine or it may get prices from the model itself. When the end-user finishes configuring their product, they return to their cart with the configured product with prices from their configuration session.
In Release 6.0 and higher, you can create Aggregated Products. An aggregated product is a product that comprises a collection of products, each of which shares essential characteristics with the others, but each of which differs from the others in minor but significant ways. Since they share essential characteristics, the individual products would not be separate products in a product category.
For example, an enterprise might have an aggregated wire product which comprises a number of individual wire products each of which differs from the other only in length, gauge, or color. You would not create a product category, since these are not different products. Each wire product is technically the same product, differing only in color, gauge, or length. You would not create an assembly, since these are not individual parts of a larger product. You can, however, create an aggregated product that would contain the same wire products, each of which differs only in color and/or length.
There are two ways to assign products to an aggregated product. You can create products as part of the aggregated product, or you can assign existing products to the aggregated product. If you assign an existing product to the aggregated product, then the existing product no longer is assigned to the product categories to which it was currently assigned. It becomes part of the product category to which the aggregated product belongs. Any features assigned to the product remain assigned provided that they are consistent with the assignment of feature types to the product category in which the aggregated product is assigned.
In Release 7.0.1, you can manage features both in C3 Product Manager and in C3 Advisor.
Figure 8 shows the feature hierarchy in the Comergent eBusiness System.
Features are characteristics of products. For example, a company that sells computers might offer a model that comes in four colors, has a 21" monitor, a 700MHz processor, a 20GB hard drive, an internal 56K modem, a writable CD drive, a DVD drive, and an ergonomic keyboard. Each of these characteristics is a feature.
Feature types are collections of features. Usually these are features that are in some way related to each other, and so form a logical "type" of feature. To continue the previous example, the company that sells computers offers computers with several different processor speeds. Customers can buy computers that come with processors of 450MHz, 500MHz, 550MHz, 600MHz, and 700MHz. Thus, 450MHz, 500MHz, 550MHz, 600MHz, and 700MHz would all be features, and they could be grouped into a feature type named "Processor Speed". Other feature types might include "Monitor Size", "Available Memory (RAM)", "Hard Drive" and "Internet Connectivity".
Feature type groups provide a means of grouping feature types. Using the same example, some feature types that relate to a computer's performance are processor speed, hard drive, and available memory. The company might decide to attribute the feature type group "Performance" to these feature types.
When an end-user experiences the guided selling experience, they answer questions in a questionnaire. These answers comprises features that are created and assigned to products in C3 Product Manager. When an end-user answers a question, the screen displays the products to which the answer (feature) has been assigned.
To provide these questions and answers, one or more enterprise users create a questionnaire using C3 Advisor. They use features and feature types to define attributes of products that will help end-users to find the products they want. By assigning features and feature types, therefore, you are defining how the product selection and product comparison tools work.
You create the feature types and features using the Feature Management panel in C3 Product Manager or the C3 Advisor Administration link from the Comergent eBusiness System home page.
You can assign features to products by assigning features to the product category to which the product belongs. In this case, the feature is automatically assigned to all the products in a category. You can also assign features to products on a product-by-product basis.
You can assign features to a product when you are modifying a product, or you can assign a feature to one or more products when you are modifying the feature.
When you assign a feature type to a category, the features belonging to that type are available to be assigned to the products in that category as well as products in subcategories of the category. When you assign individual features to a category, those features are automatically assigned to all the products within the category and within subcategories of the category. This is referred to as power assignment. In Release 6.4 and higher, you can also mark the feature for inheritance so that as new products are added to the product category, then the feature is automatically assigned to the new products.
In some cases, features may only be effective (available to customers) during a given time period. This is feature effectivity. For example, the computer company described in the previous sections may currently offer a model of desktop computer with processors of 450MHz, 500MHz, 600MHz, and 700MHz. However, as the marketplace changes, and demand for higher processor speeds increases, the company may decide to change the set of processors from which their customers are permitted to choose. Starting in the next financial quarter, the same desktop model will only be available with processors of 500MHz, 600MHz, 700MHz, and 933MHz. When the company's C3 Advisor administrator creates these features, they can set an effectivity for each feature, specifying that until a certain date (the last date of the quarter) the feature 450MHz will be available, but that after that date it will no longer be available. Conversely, before a certain date (the first day of the next quarter) the feature 933MHz will not be available, but after that date, it will be available.
An assembly is a product that refers to a set of items (products and text items) that together form the assembly. For example, a laptop may actually comprise a laptop computer, a docking station, a monitor, and a warranty. In this example, three of the items in this assembly are products, while the fourth item (the warranty) is a text item. The assembly is used to enable a customer to order all four items as a single product.
When you create a product as an assembly, there is an Assembly tab that enables you to add the items that make up this assembly. When you define the product, you will be able to select products from the product hierarchy
See To Define the Parts in an Assembly for the tasks involved in creating an assembly.
You can also create a hot spot for each part in a parts diagram image of an assembly. When an end-user displays the assembly, the end-user can order one or more parts in the assembly by clicking on their respective hot spots. The hot spot can be any spot in the image: you can make a hot spot out of a callout designation for the part, or you can make the image of the part itself as the hot spot.
When you create a product, you choose from one of these types: normal, assembly, configurable, or aggregated. A configurable product refers to a product which is customized at the time of purchase by the end-user by making a series of selections. For example, the product catalog contains a product called a "Bicycle", but the "Bicycle" does not exist as a single selectable item. Rather, the "Bicycle" represents a model created by a modeler (using the Visual Modeler); that is, a series of choices. The "Bicycle" can have one of four frame types, three wheel types, and so on. The customer selects the frame type, wheel type, and so on, at the time of purchase, and therefore defines the product at that time.
Before you create a configurable-type product in C3 Product Manager, a corresponding model must be created using the Visual Modeler. See Using the Visual Modeler for more information about the Visual Modeler. |
You can also create pre-configured products. In some cases, your company might have a need for products that are pre-configured. For example, the product "Bicycle" can be configured with a number of different selections. However, you might notice that your end-users select a specific configuration most of the time. In other cases, you might notice that they begin with a certain set of common selections before they achieve the configuration they want.
For these cases, you create pre-configured products. When you create a product as a configurable type, that product has an extra tab, a Configuration tab. A button in this tab enables you to select the configuration for this pre-configured product.
When your end-users select this product from the catalog, they can either buy the pre-configured product as is or use the pre-configured product as a base which they can then reconfigure to their specifications.
See Managing Pre-Configured Products for the steps involved.
The Comergent eBusiness System supports the ability for one product to supersede one or more products: that is, you can specify that a product has become obsolete and that references to it should be referred to another product. A product is obsolete if the current date is out of the range of its effectivity dates. In order to specify supersession, you must specify both the superseded product and the superseding product.
The Comergent eBusiness System only checks whether a product has been superseded if the current date is out of the range of the product's effectivity dates.
If the superseding product is itself obsolete, then the Comergent eBusiness System checks whether there is a superseding product for the obsolete superseding product. In this way, you can create a chain (series) of products each of which supersedes a preceding product. You can view the supersession stack for a product through the Supersession tab.
For example, if product A is superseded by product B and product B is superseded by product C, then the supersession chain for product A is both product B and product C. When you click on the Remove Chain for product A, the link is only broken between product A and the supersession chain. Product A is no longer superseded by any product but product B is still superseded by product C.
See Superseding a Product for the tasks involved in supersession.
You can move products from one category to another, as described in To Move a Product to Another Category. One of the potential problems in doing this is "feature mismatch", that is, the features assigned to the product may not have corresponding feature types in its new parent category. A user interface enables you to reconcile this mismatch by manually adding the missing feature types to the new parent category. This automatically adds the features belonging to the feature type. If you do not add a feature type, then the type's features are automatically unassigned from the product. See Feature Types and Features for a description of feature types and features and their relationships to products categories and products.
You can export product data (including product categories, products, feature types, and features) as either a dXML, cXML, RosettaNet, or xCBL file and send it to selling partners such as resellers, distributors, OEMs, and Net Markets. Exporting the Product Catalog describes the tasks.
You include list price data for the products by selecting a price list that contains the products in the export set.
The file is stored, by default, in the debs_home/Comergent/catalogexport/ directory. You can rename the catalogexport directory, but the new directory must be located in the debs_home/Comergent/ directory. See the Comergent eBusiness System Implementation Guide for the location of the debs_home directory.
Once you have created the export set, you have the option of exporting the set immediately or clicking a button to display a screen that enables you to schedule a cron job to export at regular intervals. See To Export the Catalog Using a Cron Job.
If you include an aggregated product (see Aggregated Products) in an export set, then the products that comprise the aggregated product are automatically included in the export set.
When you have large amounts of product data that you want to add to the Comergent eBusiness System, you can import a catalog as an import set in dXML format. See Importing Products for a description of the process. During the process, you define an insertion point, that is, a place in the product category hierarchy, a parent category within which you want to place the products.
You can provide pricing information with the imported products as follows. A price list can be associated to an import set: when the products in the dXML file are imported, pricing information in the dXML file is used to add products to the price list or to update prices if they are already on the price list.
In some cases, your partners might carry products in addition to yours that they want to make available through your catalog. The partner administrator for such partners can create and maintain product categories and products in the catalog within certain "open" categories.
When the enterprise administrator creates a product category, that category is, by default, "closed" to partners. Partner administrators cannot create categories or products within a "closed" category. Using an interface in C3 Product Manager, the enterprise administrator chooses the partners for whom this category is "open". The enterprise administrator can also close categories to a partner, whether the category is created by the enterprise administrator or the partner administrator.
The products in your product catalog may be supplied by your enterprise or by one or more of your partners. When you or one of your partners put a product on a price list, then the partner that owns the price list is the supplier for that price list. If the price list is assigned to a partner, then, implicitly, you are expressing the fact that the partner that owns the price list can act as the supplier of the products on the price list to the partner to whom the price list is assigned.
For example, suppose that Price List 1 is owned by the enterprise and suppose that Product X is on this price list. If Price List 1 is assigned to Partner A, then users of Partner A can buy Product X and the enterprise can supply it. If Price List 2 is owned by the Anderel partner and Product X is also on Price List 2, then if Price List 2 is also assigned to Partner A, then users of Partner A can also select Anderel as the supplying partner of Product X before they place their order.
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