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Create Energy Product Models
Energy products typically consist of an offer with multiple cost components. These are modeled as a parent product with multiple child products in a bundle. In an Order, these child products appear as line items in the Cart.
Some child products are physical devices such as boilers or solar panels, services such as energy usage optimization, or standing charges such as tariffs. However, most are unit rates for consumption of electricity, gas, and other commodities.
Large commercial customers can have different unit rates for the same commodity. For example, electricity rates can be different for peak and off-peak hours, different seasons, and different levels of consumption. Each rate is modeled as a separate child product in the same bundle. (For multi-site customers in which different rates apply to different sites, advanced rules remove non-applicable rates for each site.)
Usage pricing applies to unit rates, and to standing charges for easier calculation of totals. You can forecast usage based on historical consumption or industry-based estimates, giving your customer an estimate of cost and the provider an estimate of revenue. Usage pricing can be combined with attribute pricing or cost and margin.
Energy & Utilities Cloud product catalogs often map to product catalogs in third-party billing, pricing, and other systems. It is important to keep these product catalogs aligned.
Electricity for Residential Customers
Monique works at Lightning Energy and has been asked to create a product bundle that is available to residential customers needing only electricity. It consists of a Fixed Energy parent product and two child products: Standing Charges and Unit Rate. The Usage Price Total for the Unit Rate is a forecast based on an estimate of the electricity usage.
To create these products, Monique must create Picklists, Attribute Categories, Attributes, Object Types, Product Specifications, and finally, the product bundle that brings everything together. Subsequent topics continue Monique's example and describe these tasks in more detail.
Here is how the Fixed Energy parent product bundle looks in the Cart:
