Overview of the Customer Product
The customer product, which is an instance of a specific product that you have sold to a customer, is the heart of the Oracle Service installed base. Each customer product record holds information about the customer (addresses and contacts), the product sold (quantities, serial number, revision), the sales order (order number, order date, selling price, agreement), the shipment (shipment date), and the installation (installation date).
You can create customer product records by:
- capturing customer order lines automatically during order processing in Order Entry/Shipping
- defining customer products manually using the Define Customer Products form in Oracle Service
See: Capturing Serviceable Products During Order Entry and Defining Customer Products.
Customer Product Types
You can optionally categorize customer products with user-defined customer product types. For example, you can create and assign customer product types such as Hardware, Software, Under Contract, etc. Note that customer product types are informational only. See: Setting Up Customer Product Types.
Customer Product Statuses
You can use customer product statuses to indicate the current state and transactability of a customer product. For example, customer products generated by new customer orders may be assigned a customer product status of Latest. Defective customer products that are returned and replaced can be assigned a status of Replaced in the Oracle Service Depot Repair module. When you cancel order lines in Oracle Order Entry, the related customer products in the installed base are automatically assigned a status of Cancelled. When you sell a new product upgrade in Order Entry/Shipping, the customer product to be upgraded may be assigned a status of Upgraded. You can assign a status of Terminated for customer products that are no longer active or supported. In addition to these predefined statuses, you can define your own. Each of these statuses has attributes that define the manner in which they affect the customer product. See: Setting Up Customer Product Statuses.
Customer Product Transfers
If you sell to distributors or dealers, you can transfer customer products from the distributor to an end customer as end customers identify themselves to your support organization. When you transfer customer products, any warranties and service programs attached to transferred customer products will be passed along to the end customer. See: Transferring Customer Products.
Customer Product Quantity Splits
Each customer product record contains the quantity sold. For serviceable products under serial control, Oracle Service will automatically split the customer product into quantities of one. Each new customer product created from the split carries the same attributes of the original customer product, but has a quantity of one and a unique serial number. You can also manually split customer products. Reasons for splitting customer product quantities could be:
- isolating a quantity for transfer to an end customer
- setting apart a quantity to terminate
- setting apart a quantity to apply (order) a new service program
- setting apart a quantity to upgrade or repair
See: Splitting Customer Products.
Customer Product Dates
If you ship loaners, advance replacements, or advance exchanges to customers, the return-by date associated with a customer product tracks the date by which your customer is expected to return the replaced, exchanged, or loaned item. Similarly, the installed base keeps track of the date on which the customer returns the replaced, exchanged, or loaned item.
Systems
You can optionally group customer products into logical groupings called systems. For example, you can group customer products like printers, monitors, and servers at a customer site into a logical system. One reason to group customer products in this way might be for cotermination of service program end dates for all customer products in the group. Another reason might be that the system represents a place (a floor of a building, an airplane tail number, etc.) where all the customer products in the group are located. See: Defining Systems.
Customer Product Audit History
You can view the audit history of customer products, from the initial customer order, through transfers, splits, additions to systems, cancellations, and terminations. Oracle Service maintains an audit trail of changes, including who made the change and when.
