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About Catalog Category Hierarchies


A product catalog is a collection of products arranged in a logical hierarchy of categories, according to your company's business needs.

Figure 1 shows a schematic of a sample catalog-category hierarchy, with the catalog at the root level. The catalog is parent to three categories, which are parents of more subcategories or of products.

Figure 1. Catalog Hierarchy

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Product catalogs are organized by creating categories and structuring the categories and subcategories into parent-child relationships, to form a catalog category hierarchy. Products are then added to categories. For example, the parent category, Beverages, can contain the Ace Splash Refrigerated Juice subcategory, which contains all the Ace Splash brand refrigerated juice drink products. The Beverages category can also contain a subcategory for a different brand of beverages, Big Wave. When conducting a promotional campaign for company's line of beverages, you can use the category or subcategory definition, such as Big Wave, to be sure that only those associated products are included or are available to be included in the promotion.

For the purpose of using the Sales Volume Planning (SVP) module however, a category-subcategory hierarchy must be contiguous with only one designated SVP parent (root) category. For information about setting up category product hierarchies for SVP, see Accessing the Sales Volume Planning Business Service.


 Siebel Consumer Sector Guide 
 Published: 18 April 2003