With the Summer '21 release, product specifications and offerings are separate, but offers can inherit characteristics from product specifications. You can manage and configure an offer independently of a product specification. The offer specifications feature is available only with Product Designer in Communications Cloud.
Aligning with the TM Forum Frameworx, the Enterprise Product Catalog decouples offerings from product specifications. A product offering sells, or realizes, a product specification. A product specification can have one or more associated offers. A product specification represents a product available to customers, but it has no pricing information and is not sold to customers. A specification is realized as an offer, which has pricing and is sold to clients.
Previously, offers did not inherit characteristics from product specifications, and the two could be used interchangeably, such as product specifications defined as child products of an offer.
Offers and product specifications can be simple or bundled. These settings define valid relationships for offers and specifications:
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Whether an offer or specification has child offers or specifications
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Whether an offer can be associated with a product specification
An offer can sell a bundled, or composite, product specification, which includes the parent product specification and its child specifications.
For backward compatibility, offers and product specifications can also be null — neither simple or bundled. The null option allows existing product specifications and offers to continue to work in your product catalog.
A benefit of this model is that you can create a layout definition for object types (with sections, attributes, and fields) that you don’t have to modify product specifications for specific versions of products. Instead, you can define a more specific layout in a product specification that is common across specific offers. You can customize the offer's layout if needed.
The following conditions determine the offer's layout:
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If an offer is associated with an object type (not a product specification), it inherits the object type’s layout.
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If an offer is not associated with an object type or a product specification, it inherits the Product2 Object layout.
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If a product specification is not based on an object type, it inherits the Product2 Object layout.
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If an offer is associated with a product specification, it inherits the layout of the associated product specification.
When designing your product catalog, consider these guidelines for when to use offers, object types, or product specifications.
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Object types are classifications defined by the line of business. They are useful as internal classifications of products.
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Object types are not used by order capture, only by EPC.
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Product specifications have cardinalities, but object types do not.
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Offerings typically have prices and can be added to Industries Cart because those are sold to clients. Product specifications are typically not sold.
- Product Specifications and Characteristics for Product Designer
A product specification is a fundamental entity for which you define parameters (attributes or fields), such as bundling, pricing rules, fulfillment rules, and compatibility rules. - Create Offerings in the Product Designer
After you define product specifications, you can associate them with prices, promotions, and context rules to create offers or commercial products that customers can purchase. - Checking Configurations for Offers and Specifications
You can check that your commercial products are correctly configured for the Specification Type value. Use these reports to identify mismatched bundled products or products with no specification type. - Resolving Conflicts for Attribute Assignments
Conflicts can occur when attributes are copied across objects. A precedence order determines which attributes are discarded or recreated: Object Type > Product Spec > Product Offer.