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Product Catalogue

Product Catalogue

Owned by Maciej Simm (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Mar 08, 2022

Product Catalogue module provides fully declarative tools allowing Product Managers and System Administrators to manage the structure of the catalog, product specifications their attributes, workflows & pricing without the need for programmatic changes within an application. This approach drastically simplifies catalog administration and reduces time-to-market to launch new product offerings.

Key Features

Product Designer

Provides System Administrators & Product Managers with a fully declarative user interface that allows flexible set up product specifications.

Picture above - Product Designer interface presenting sample Ethernet Line product. This illustration shows the product structure from the Administrator side. All of the input fields available for entry are configurable attributes linked to the product.

Product specification is built out of the following elements:

  • Attributes represent configurable fields exposed to Sales Executives for data entry (also known as run-time parameters). The system supports various types of attributes, i.e.: Picklists, Radio Buttons, Number, Text, Text Areas, Currency, Lookups and Location attributes. Attributes are generic, reusable blocks (single attribute can be used in multiple products) and they can be linked with a particular product by Product Attribute junction.
    Example of an attribute: Contract Length

  • Parameters represent non-configurable product characteristics that are a descriptive part of its specification (also known as design-time parameters). Parameters can be used to describe product features and they can be used for the purpose of filtering and comparisons of different products.
    Example of a parameter: Screen Size (e.g. of a Smartphone)

  • Attribute Default Values allow you to define default values of attributes in the context of the certain product.
    Example: 24 months is default selection of Contract Length attribute in Internet Access product

  • Attribute Value Dependencies allow to define dependencies between values of different attributes to enforce proper data entry.
    Example: Premium SLA is only available for 24 & 36 months Contract Length

  • Attribute Rules allow to define the business logic layer in the product configuration and allow to enforce configuration correctness. Following rule types are supported:
    - disablement for disabling attributes when certain criteria are met
    - hide for hiding attributes when certain criteria are met
    - alert rules for displaying suggestions in the product configuration
    - validation rules for validation of user input
    - other attribute updates for setting values of certain attributes
    Example of a validation rule: number of racks must be between 5 - 20

  • Options represent individual product variants. An option is an effectively non-configurable product that is equivalent to a single SKU. Options are used in the system mainly to be able to define different product pricing. Options are generated either from the combination of different option-affecting attributes or different combinations of bundle mix.
    Example of an option: Internet product may have 3 available options differentiating price depending on bandwidth: Internet 50MB, Internet 100MB, Internet 600MB

  • Images allow users to define product images to nicely display them in the product catalog regardless if it’s only used internally or exposed directly to customers.

  • Charges allow to introduce more complex pricing logic in the product configuration and flexibly build product pricing models out of different, conditionally applied one-time, recurring & usage charge components.

  • Product Relationships allow to define relations (product relations, up-sell, cross-sell relationships) between different products.

  • Product Provisioning Plans allow to link products with product provisioning plans that are used in the Order phase to decompose delivery process into delivery work orders.

  • Product Resources allow to set-up decomposition of products into Resource Facing Services in order to simplify integrations with underlying OSS systems. 

The product catalog architecture was designed following industry guidelines from TM Forum SID - Information Framework. Enxoo BSS operates mostly on the level of Customer Facing Services, that are then decomposed to Resource Facing Services by a configurable mapping within the product catalog. As a result - every Commercial Service (e.g. IP Transit) can be decomposed to Logical Resources (e.g. IP address) and Physical Resources (devices or circuits).

Pricebooks Management

Introduces a declarative way to manage product price lists. Enxoo BSS was designed with an architectural principle to leverage capabilities of standard Salesforce Pricebooks for all aspects of product pricing management.

Enxoo BSS comes with a Pricebooks Management Tool that provides an easy-to-use interface for Pricebooks Management allowing to easily manage large pricebooks in an Excel-like format.

 

Picture above - Pricebook Management Tool is also exposed in the context of an individual product presenting a tree of charges in a visual way.

There are two fundamental reasons why Standard Pricebook object is used for the purpose of defining pricing: first is that it natively supports multi-currency, but it also allows to define multiple pricebooks for different channels / accounts.

Using this concept apart from Master Pricebooks that will represent global price lists within the organization, Enxoo BSS supports the concept of defining Partner Pricebooks that can be linked with specific accounts allowing to narrow down the list of product offerings available for particular customers as well as introduce discount / uplift overlays as a deviation from the master price lists.

Together with Enxoo BSS Version 3, we’ve also introduced the concept of a complex Price Tables. Pricing Administrator can now flexibly define multidimensional table containing values of different product attributes and prices that match these configurations. This allows us to support most complex pricing models that could be imagined.

Picture above - Example pricing table where the price of Connectivity is dependent on Country, Bandwidth, Cloud Provider and Cloud Instance.

Price Rules

Allow to define an additional overlay on top of pricebooks where certain price rule actions are applied when certain price rule conditions are satisfied. This allows pricing administrators to introduce global or product / account specific discounts that do not require the generation of product options.

Picture above - Price Rule definition screen presenting an example of a Discount rule that is applying a limited time 10% discount to MRC (monthly recurring charge) for all products where the value of A Interface attribute is equal to 100 Gigabit Ethernet or Contract Length is equal to 120 months.

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Solution Map:

Available in:

  • Enxoo BSS - core package (enxCPQ)