This is the first of a series of questions from SO4IT a Swedish IT
consultancy company who are using GigaSpace technology to build a SID based
Order Management system for Communications Service Providers.
SO4IT: A ProductOffering contains all the commercial
parts of a product or products we offer to our customers. It has a relationship to a ProductSpecification
which has 0 or more ProductCharacteristics. I understand that we will define common attributes
on the ProductSpecification and others, not common to all Product Specifications,
as ProductCharacteristics.
Andrew: This is all correct: the ProductSpecification
is a form of template or formula used to create ProductOfferings. If we were talking about selling soap-powder
then the ProductSpecification would be the list of chemicals that make up the
soap-powder and the ProductOffering would be cover the branding, the size of
the box the soap-powder is sold in, and words written on the box
.
SO4IT: The Product Offering + Product Specification
+ Product Characteristics in the Product-Management module is like the template
for the Product. When we create a Product
from this we create a Product with CFS, RFS and Resources. What
information do we duplicate and what information do we just reference from the Product
Specification? In a very basic set-up I
would guess that it would be the ProductCharacteristicValues and in that case
each ProductCharacteristicValue would link back to the ProductCharacteristic it
belongs to. Whenever looking up what Products
a Customer has we would need to access both the Product and the Product Specification
it comes from to give the Customer the full picture, right, and when we
instantiate a Product from this what information do we carry with us to the
Product?
Andrew: The ProductSpecification is linked to the
CFSSpecs it needs and these will be instantiated as CFSs when the product is
purchased/provisioned. The RFSs on the
other hand are the network or low level “technical” services needed to make the
CFSs work and are not directly linked to the Product. The Resources are more complex; most telco products
have hardware and software associated with them and these, at this level, are
represented by the ResourceSpecifications relationship with the
ProductSpecification and the Resource that the customer buys or already owns
and its relationship with the Product – this can be a little confusing because
SID mainly talks about the other kind of Resources: the Resources that make up the
telecom’s companies network.
The values in the ProductCharacteristic would be the things
that can be tailored for a Customer or the Customer may alter. Things like Weight, Height, Width, and
Frequency cannot be altered and therefore would not be duplicated, but
something like Language, or Password which the Customer can select would be
stored in a ProductCharacteristic. The
ProductSpecification and its characteristics are the technical spec for the
product – the Product and its characteristics are the define the properties of
the particular instance of the Spec – the things the Customer can change or
that changes over time – perhaps battery charge (though I think that is going a
little far).
SO4IT: I would like to understand something about
pricing. In SID I can see
ProductOfferingPrice and ProductSpecificationPrice. So how do we decide the final price, will it
be a combination of all these then? And
how do you then model dependencies like the price will be this in case he
chooses the ProductCharacteristic A with ProductCharacteristicValue AA etc?
Andrew: There is no ProductSpecificationPrice in SID
only ProductSpecifcationCost which is meant to be used to record things like
the raw material cost or R&D cost of developing the product. The price is based on the
ProductOfferingPrice and can be varied by using DiscountProdPriceAlteration.
End of Q1
