Some customer relationship management (CRM) systems, such as Oracle Siebel CRM, use product specifications to define a type or class of products (for example, DSL). Product specifications include dynamic attributes (characteristics) for a specific type of product. For example, DSL attributes might include Up Speed, Down Speed, Quality of Service, or Service ID.
Product specifications, of course, cannot be sold. Only products can be sold. When a marketing team decides to sell a new DSL product called DSL Titanium, for example, they can assign this new product to the DSL product specification, and include new attributes for this product so that a higher bandwidth or quality of service could be offered at a different price.
Typically, you create product specifications in a master product catalog (such as the Oracle Product Hub), import them into Oracle Communications Design Studio, and use the Product Specification editor to review and edit the attributes (you can, however, also create new product specifications in Design Studio, as necessary).
You map one or multiple product specifications to one fulfillment pattern. Fulfillment patterns are abstractions of product specifications. Mapping product specifications to existing fulfillment patterns enables you to introduce new products or classes of products with minimal fulfillment configuration.
Incoming customer orders contain order items that include product specification attributes as key/value pairs. For example, an order item may contain the DSL attribute Up Speed with a value of 1MB. Product specification attributes enable Design Studio to anticipate the structure of an order item and pass the attribute key/value pairs to downstream systems.
Product specifications have the ability to inherit attributes from other product specifications, and the product catalog may have hierarchies of product specifications defined. You might, for example, configure a number of attributes on a base product specification (parent product specification), then define multiple child classes that include all of the base attributes of the parent product specification, plus additional attributes.