4 Service Specifications

Learn about service specifications and how to manage them.

Service Specification Overview

A service specification is a template you can use to create or modify services in the provisioning system.

Service specifications reflect the attributes associated with a service, for example, a data or a voice service. While product specifications are a functional representation of service offerings from a marketing or sales perspective, service specifications represent their realization, provisioning, and activation.

A product specification is restricted to service specification for non-tangible goods (services).

Define and Use Service Specifications

As a product specialist, you must create service specifications using the Specifications tile in the Workbench workspace or using the available REST API, associate one or more service specifications with your product specification, and use them when creating an offer. For example, for a wireless service such as Mobile Messaging, you use the mobile service specification attributes, associate it to the Text Messaging product specification, and use it when creating an offer called SMS Unlimited.

You can associate more than one service specification to the product specification, but you must specify a primary and auxiliary service specification relationship. Service offers and service offer bundles must consist of products that are attached to service specifications. Offers that contain products specifications without service specifications are device offers.

Compare Service Specifications

You can compare two different Service Specifications or two versions of the same Service Specification. In the Workbench work area, open the Actions menu and choose Compare Service Specifications.

Note:

If you use Service Catalog and Design (SCD) to manage technical catalog definitions and Launch to manage commercial catalog definitions, don’t create service specifications in Launch, as ownership of that entity resides in SCD.

Manage Service Specifications

You can create and manage your service specifications through REST APIs or through the user interface.

For more information on using REST APIs, see Use REST APIs to Create Catalog Entities in Launch Cloud Service Implementation Guide.

The user interface allows you to perform the following tasks: create, update, delete, list, and query service specifications. create, update, delete, list or find service specification objects, retrieve a service specification by ID, and partially update a service specification by ID.

To create and edit service specifications from the user interface:
  1. Navigate to the Workbench tab and then click Specifications. The Specifications page appears.
  2. Click Create Service Specification.
  3. In the Identifying information section, specify the name and description and select the Initiative with which the service specification is associated.

    Note:

    A default ID is generated for you, but you also specify your own ID.
  4. Specify the effective start and end dates of the service specification.
  5. Add existing attributes. When you add new attributes, you can create simple or aggregate attributes.
  6. Add collateral information if needed, which can include attachments like images and documents.