Creating Technical Products

In Industries Order Management, a commercial product is any product that is visible to the customer either on the shelf or in their cart. A technical product is any product that is generally not visible to the customer but is required for fulfillment.

Technical products are used to fulfill orders, and are often defined by the requirements of the downstream system, such as billing, fulfillment, logistics, and other systems that are involved in the fulfillment process. Technical products are not always required. Commercial products that are defined sufficiently can be used for fulfillment.

Technical products should be created in the following situations:

• The commercial product entity cannot fully describe the product entity in terms that can be understood by the downstream systems.

• The details of the product entity should be masked from the customer.

• The product entity maps to a multitude of underlying products, services or resources.

• To consolidate the number of callouts to a downstream system.

Industries Order Management gives you the tools to translate commercial products to their corresponding technical products. It does this using Decomposition Relationships that map the fields and attributes of commercial products to decomposition attributes.

Technical product specifications should be defined using product attributes only. Order Management’s functionality relies on product attributes to communicate product and fulfillment information with external systems.

For more information on creating products in Vlocity Product Console, refer to the EPC documentation.