1. User's Guide
  2. Product Specifications

5 Product Specifications

Product Specification Overview

Use this topic to understand what product specifications are and how you create and manage them in the Launch application.

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

  • At design time including their characteristics, characteristic values, characteristic 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 a product specification

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.

The Workbench page displays a list of all your product specifications along with details such as name, version, description, lifecycle status, and so on. You can manage your product specifications using the various options provided to you on this page as follows:

  • Create product specifications and use them as you create a product offer.
  • View, edit, delete, revise, retire, and obsolete existing product specifications.
  • Create new product specifications by including simple or aggregate characteristics.
  • Manage product specifications by editing or removing both simple and aggregate characteristics.
  • You can also provide additional information like display name.
  • Associate your product specifications to an initiative.
  • Change the lifecycle status of product specifications. Associate your product specifications with additional specifications, such as:
    • Parent product specifications: Associate and inherit the attributes from parent product specifications to the product specification that you're creating and view these in the Inherited Attributes section. When you create offers using product specifications, you can use the attributes from the specification as well as the ones inherited from the parent specification. This enables you to create a hierarchy of product specifications through inheritance which promotes reusability and proliferation of product specifications.
    • Service specifications: Service specifications reflect the characteristics associated to a service, for example, data service, or a voice service. You can create service specifications through REST APIs and associate multiple service specifications to your product specification and use them while creating an offer. For example, for a wireless service such as Mobile Messaging, you use the mobile service specification characteristics, associate it to the Text Messaging product specification, and create an offer called SMS Unlimited.
    • Usage specifications: Usage specifications refer to the usage characteristics 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 characteristics, such as Gold, Platinum. You can provide special rates for customer types like gold and silver. You can create usage specifications via REST APIs.
  • Create a SKU template using the attributes of the parent product specification or your current product specification and specify the SKU code formats. SKU part numbers help you group similar product definitions (simple physical goods with variant attributes), and allow you to generate SKU numbers for the different combinations of product attributes. Here's an example. A physical device, such as, a smart phone can be sold in three colors (black, white, gold) with three storage types (64GB, 128GB and 256GB). This results in nine different combinations that can be purchased. Each combination requires a part number that can be used by the back end fulfillment system when purchased. Now, instead of creating nine different product definitions, a single product definition leveraging product attribute-based pricing with its own part number can be assigned to each combination of attributes. This enables you to efficiently manage device variant pricing and fulfillment.
Related Topics

Create a Product Specification

To create a product specification:

  1. Click Workbench and then click Create Product Specification.

  2. Specify the name, effective start and end dates, and other details about the product specification. Here are some considerations when creating a product specification:
    • You can select an initiative to associate your specification with, and 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.

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. Here's how you can go about it.

  1. On the Create Product Specification page, SKU template section, click Add SKU Template.

  2. On the New SKU Template page, provide a name, description, and add the required attributes.

  3. Click Add.

    A SKU Code section appears on the New SKU Template page.

  4. Add ID and values for each of the SKUs that you just created.

  5. Optionally, you can also click Add Images to add an image to your SKU template.

  6. Click Add.