Types of Entities

You can use the following table to understand the definition of different entities then read about how these entities work together later in this topic. This guide contains a chapter on each of these entities.

Understanding Entity Relationships

Here's how the entities are related to each other.

A product is usually a service or a resource instantiated by a product offer which is always defined by product specifications. Product specifications are detailed descriptions of tangible or intangible objects available in the form of a product offer to users.

Product offers are created as simple or bundle offers. A simple offer is an atomic offer, whereas a bundle offer is a grouping of simple offers or nested bundle offers. An example of a bundle offer is a home-based internet service that combines three simple offers, such as, internet connection, e-mail service, and home security.

After you decide the offer type, based on product specifications, you can associate prices to the offer. You can use a simple or advanced pricing model. A simple pricing model comprises one-time fee, recurring fee, or a usage fee. An advanced pricing model comprises allowances, tiered pricing, attribute-based pricing or overages. Additionally, existing price plans avoid proliferation of offers and help manage pricing structures. Along with pricing, alterations are also made to charges incurred for a product offer and can take many different forms, such as adjustments and discounts. Price alterations like discount and markup can be specified on specific price types for service bundles, packages, or commercial bundles.

You can also add promotions to an offer to provide additional benefits such as discounts, reduction, or awards over a short duration to a customer who has met pre-defined criteria.

Further, you can add rules to help determine how a product offer is made available in the market. Eligibility rules decide the parameters, compatibility rules specify the inclusion or exclusion of a combination of products, recommendation rules provide cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, and upgrade and downgrade rules define the permissible offers to migrate to or migrate from with defined terms.

The product offers are also grouped into catalogs and categories, which represent the collection of product offers. The product offers can also be grouped based on product lines. When a product offer is created taking into consideration the various aspects described earlier, it's published to the market whereby it's treated as a product for customer service providers.

Initiatives tie all the entities together to help manage the lifecycle statuses of all the entities and publish them into a production run-time environment. When you create or edit entities, the in-design entities available for selection within the fields on the page are in context of the initiative you specify on that page. For example, when you create offers, the product specifications drop-down list will contain only those in-design specifications that are associated to the initiative specified on the page.

Read the chapters in this guide for more information about creating and managing these entities in the Launch application.

Entity Validations

Validations are enforced into top-level entities to ensure that the referenced or included resources must be valid during the effective period of the top-level resource. For example, a product specification valid from Oct 1, 2018 to Dec 31, 2018 cannot be used to create an offer having valid from Nov 1, 2018 to Mar 30, 2019. Only if the validity of the product specification had a wider validity covering the offer validity, it would be possible to create the product offering.

Search and Filter Entities

You can use the search option available on the landing page of each top-level entity in the Launch application to narrow down your search within the listed entities.

The search filters include the following options and the search results may vary depending on how the search is set up or what data is available.

• Auto complete

• Type ahead

• Recent

• Tags

• Count

• Lifecycle status

Support for Multiple Business Units

A Communications Service Provider (CSP) organization can have many Business Units (BU) based on their regional and/or line of business that they operate upon. Having such segregations allow the CSPs to manage and operate their business needs, separated by their business units. Each BU can have its own set of catalog definitions for products and services and/or can share the common ones based on how their BU's need to operate.

Launch supports multiple business units to share or have exclusivity for product offerings and price lists. You can restrict the usage of product offers and price lists to a particular BU for their specific market offerings or open it up for usage across all or share amongst a few BUs. During product offering creation, the users BU would be set by default. Additionally, you could add more BUs to promote data sharing. During bundle product offering creation, the components would belong to the user BU only and will not contain components from different BU's. The same is applicable to price list entity. Business unit striping does not apply for other entities such as product offering price, specifications, attributes, catalog, categories, rules, terms, initiatives, and so on. These entities are common across all BUs.

For example, a CSP has 2 BUs (BU1 and BU2). Offers and price lists can be created for BU1 to be exclusive to BU1. Offers and price lists created as part of BU2 can be made exclusive to BU2.

This allows multiple business units to have sharing and exclusivity options during modeling market offers.

The configuration steps are as follows:

1. Create Organization > 2. Create Business Unit > 3. Create Resource Organization > 4. Create Resource User > 5. Associate BU and User to Organization > 6. Link Resource User to Security User (if security user is already created)

For setup details on business units, see Launch Cloud Service Implementation Guide.