Product Specifications

5 Product Specifications

Learn about product specifications and how to create and manage them in the Launch application.

Product Specification Overview

Product specifications determine how product offers are used during the following stages in their lifecycle:

At design time including their attributes, attribute values, attribute layout structure, and restrictions.
When customers are ordering or configuring them, including their configuration layout, configuration model, and transactional attributes.
When product offers are provisioned, including their service specification and the constraints on their billing specification.
Product specifications also control how product offers can be priced.

Define and Use Product Specifications

When you create a product specification, you can either start from scratch or clone an existing product specification. If you clone a product specification, be sure to view its references. See Create a Product Specification for more details.

Before you clone, revise, or delete a product specification or offer, you must review the entities that may be referencing the specification or offer. Viewing references helps you assess the effect that your actions might have on the related entities and can help prevent the proliferation of offers to the market. You can view these references from the actions menu on the landing page of a specification or offer.

Use the Workbench page to manage product specifications across their lifecycle. You can identify product specifications by name, version, description, and lifecycle status, and perform tasks such as the following:

Create product specifications and use them as you create a product offer.
View, edit, delete, revise, retire, clone, and obsolete existing product specifications.
Create new product specifications by including simple or aggregate attributes.
Manage product specifications by editing or removing both simple and aggregate attributes. See Attributes for more information.
Associate your product specifications to an initiative.
Change the lifecycle status of product specifications.
Create product specification hierarchies. You can create parent and child relationships between product specifications. Product specification inherit attribute definitions from the parent product specification, enabling easy reuse. The inherited attributes are then available, alongside the attributes defined for the child specification, when creating a product offer.
Associate your product specification with one or more service specifications. A product specification can be mapped to one or more service specifications, and service specifications can be reused across different product specifications. The service specifications represent the realization, provisioning, and activation of the services included in your product. See Service Specifications for more information about service specifications.
Usage specifications: Usage specifications refer to the usage attributes of a service, for example, you can set up a price of $50 for 100 GB of data usage, where the rates are based on phone call origin and destination. You can create usage specifications via REST APIs.
- Metering Rule: Metering rule enables you to define the way you would charge the actual usage of a service. You can associate a usage specification and service specification with the product specification and specify a metering rule. A metering rule is an expression, such as volume, duration, or occurrence. For example, a duration metering rule is calculated as Start Time to End Time.
Customer profile specification: Customer profile specifications refer to the customer categories based on different attributes, such as Gold and Platinum. You can provide special rates for customer types like gold and silver. You can create usage specifications via REST APIs.
Mapping the attributes of Product Specification and Service Specification.

Map the product specification attributes to the service specification attributes using the existing user experience for product specifications. Use these mappings to pass values between the product order and service order during fulfillment.

Example:
A service specification called Mobile Messaging CFS has the following attributes:
- ICCID, IMEI, MMSIncoming, MMSOutgoing, SMSIncoming, and SMSOutgoing
That service specification is mapped to the SIM Card PS product specification, which has the following attributes:
- ICCID, IMEI, TN, and TN Type
Then you map the ICCID and IMEI attributes from the product specification on to the same attributes for the service specification.
Create one or more SKU templates to efficiently manage variants of a product specification.

Overview of SKU Templates

If the product specification is used for physical goods type of offers, create a SKU template using attributes from the parent or current product specification, and specify the SKU code formats. SKU templates use attributes available on the parent product specification or the current product specification as an efficient way to indicate variants of simple physical goods that can be sold. By defining SKU code formats and using product attributes, you can generate unique SKU part numbers for each valid combination of attributes.

SKU part numbers help you group similar product definitions and support back-end fulfillment systems during purchase and order processing. For example, a physical device such as a smartphone may be sold in three colors (black, white, gold) and three storage options (64 GB, 128 GB, 256 GB). These attributes result in multiple purchasable combinations, each requiring a unique part number.

Instead of creating nine separate product definitions, you can create a single product definition that uses attribute-based pricing and assign SKU part numbers to each attribute combination through a SKU template. This approach enables efficient management of variant pricing and fulfillment.

Compare Product Specifications

You can compare two different product specifications or two versions of the same specification. In the Workbench work area, open the Actions menu and choose Compare Product Specifications.

Create a Product Specification

To create a product specification:

Click Workbench and then click Create Product Specification.
Specify the Name, effective Start Date, End Date, and other details about the product specification. When creating a product specification:
- You can select an initiative to associate your specification with.
- You can specify the service specifications you want to associate your product specification with. You can also associate a primary service specification to your service specification.
- Specify the parent product specification if you want to inherit and associate attributes from a parent product specification to the specification that you are creating.
- If you do not specify a layout during offer definition, then the attributes page displays the default layout.

Add Attributes

You can add an attribute with the short name. Go to the overflow menu of the added attributes and you should be able to add mappings to the attributes. You can create attributes at the time of product specification creation. If you do not find the attribute you are looking for, you can now create the attribute at the time of specification creation.

Create a SKU Template

You can choose to create a SKU template with the attributes of the parent product specification or your current product specification. See "Overview of SKU Template" in Product Specification Overview for more information.

To create a SKU template, follow the steps below:

On the Create Product Specification page, SKU template section, click Add SKU Template.
On the New SKU Template page, provide a name and description, and specify the attributes that can be used to create the SKU.
Click Add.

A SKU Code section appears on the New SKU Template page.
Add IDs for the SKUs, and then add values for each of the attributes defined in the SKU template.
Optionally, you can also click Add Images to add an image to your SKU template.
Click Add.