5 PLM - Understanding the Query Product Classes Business Flow

This chapter provides an overview of product classes in Siebel Customer Relationship Management (Siebel CRM) and discusses the design-time setup in Service Creation Environment (SCE) Studio and the support for effectivity.

This chapter includes the following sections:

Section 5.1, "Product Classes in Siebel CRM Overview"
Section 5.2, "Design-Time Setup in SCE Studio"
Section 5.3, "Solution Assumptions and Constraints"

This business flow is enabled using the Oracle Communications Order to Cash Siebel CRM and Oracle Order and Service Management (Oracle OSM) pre-built integration options.

5.1 Product Classes in Siebel CRM Overview

In Siebel CRM, product classes provide a way to organize and maintain product attributes. Product attributes describe the characteristics of products. Examples include color, size, speed, and so on. You define product attributes and associate them with one or more product classes. Product attributes have a range of values associated with them called the attribute domain. For example, an attribute bandwidth has a range of values, such as 2Mbps, 3 Mbps, 5 Mbps, and so on.

Siebel CRM supports product class hierarchies using inheritance; that is, the attributes that are associated with a class are automatically inherited by all of the subclasses in the hierarchy. The subclasses can be nested as deeply as needed. The standard recommendation is to use three levels in the hierarchy.

5.2 Design-Time Setup in SCE Studio

SCE Studio is an Eclipse plug-in-based application that maintains data in file format. It provides a data dictionary to store the metadata definitions, and data models to define various entities that are used by Oracle Order and Service Management (Oracle OSM). It provides a platform to define rules, functions, and dependencies that can be stored as files and deployed on a deployment server. These files are used during the order fulfillment process.

The current version of SCE Studio does not offer web services that you can invoke from an external service to create entities supported by it.

5.3 Solution Assumptions and Constraints

These are the assumptions and constraints:

The SCE Studio queries the product classes from Siebel CRM. Any updates made to the product specification in SCE Studio are not synchronized back to Siebel CRM.
SCE Studio maintains the mapping between the Siebel product class and the product specification.
Only product class and the associated attributes are imported into the SCE Studio. Structures, constraints, properties, user interface definitions, and so on, which can be associated with the product class in Siebel CRM, are not sent to query from SCE Studio.