Product information workspace

• 5 minutes

Product information management works with a shared product definition, categorization, identifiers across all legal entities, and specific configurations of a product so that it fits into the business processes.

Product information is essential to supply chain and commerce applications across all industries. It refers to processes and technologies that focus on centrally managing information about products (for example, across supply chains). It's crucial that companies use shared product definitions, documentation, attributes, and identifiers. In the various modules of a business solution, product-specific information and setup are required to manage the business processes that are related to specific products, product families, or product categories.

Product definition

A product is primarily defined by a product number, name, and description. However, other data is also required to describe a product or service:

• Product type (item or service)
• Product subtype (distinct products or product masters)
• Definition of the product variant model:
  • Product dimensions and dimension groups
  • Product nomenclature
  • Product configuration models
• Association of the product with one or more categories
• Definition of the product and category attributes
• Product images
• Attachments
• Units of measure and related conversions
• Translations for all names and descriptions

If your user base is international, this isn't a problem. Each user is able to see product data translated into their preferred language. A user’s preferred language can differ from the system language, but the system language is shown if no name or description are available in the user’s preferred language.

Distribution, export, and import of product data

You can create the product definition in Supply Chain Management. Additionally, you can import it from product lifecycle management, product data management, or product information management systems. Typically, when more than one instance of Supply Chain Management is used, one instance is used as the master of the product data for all other instances. This approach is supported by a large set of data entities that enable the export and import of product definition data from one instance to another.

To support the distribution of product data to many instances, Supply Chain Management lets you use Microsoft Dataverse. You can export product definitions from an instance of Supply Chain Management to Microsoft Dataverse. Then, you can use the product definitions to provision other business applications, such as Dynamics 365 Sales, with product data.

In dynamic and agile organizations, product information data changes every day. Therefore, maintenance of accurate and actual product data is a critical business process on its own.

Product masters and product variants

In an agile world where products must be quickly adapted to customer requirements, product definitions specify a set of products instead of distinct products. In Supply Chain Management, those generic products are known as product masters. Product masters hold the definition and rules that specify how distinct products are described and behave in business processes. Based on these definitions, you can generate distinct products. These distinct products are known as product variants.

A product master is associated with a product dimension group and a configuration technology to specify the business rules. The product dimensions (color, size, style, and configuration) are a specific set of attributes that you can use throughout the application to define and track specific behaviors of the related products. These dimensions also help users search for and identify the products.

Configuration technologies

You can choose among three configuration technologies:

• Predefined variants - These variants are defined by predefined product dimensions. The variant definition includes the definition of a specific valid combination of dimensions, such as color, style, and size. Each combination produces a distinct product variant.

• Dimension-based configuration - This technology is used in manufacturing scenarios and lets you use the Configuration dimension in the definition of the bill of materials (BOMs). After you've selected a specific configuration, the system uses the subset of BOM lines that are valid for that configuration for planning and production. This concept is also known as global BOM because one shared BOM is used for all configurations of a product.

• Constraint-based configuration - This technology uses a product configuration model to describe all possible attributes and components that are required to describe all possible variants of a product in a single model. You can describe the constraints of combinations of attributes through regular expressions or table-based constraints. Configuration models and configurators become more important in product information management and are used across all industries.

Product variant model definition workspace

The Product variant model definition workspace gives an overview of the product masters. It also shows the status of the release of masters and related variants to specific legal entities.

Released products

The products that are released to a specific legal entity are known as released products. You can release products in bulk to one legal entity or many legal entities at a time. Because you might need to add various properties and attributes of the products for each legal entity, the Released product maintenance workspace lets you monitor and complete the recently released products in each legal entity or in the suborganizations of a legal entity.

Released product maintenance workspace

You can set up the Released product maintenance workspace from the Configure my workspace menu item. Select a category hierarchy and category to filter the workspace by. To adjust the relevant product data in the workspace, you can also define, in days, the time fences for Recently released products and Stopped released products for product change cases that have products in the selected product category hierarchy that aren't completed and closed.

The Recently released list shows products that have been released within the time fence that is set in the workspace configuration. For each item in the list, validation is run and the validation status is shown. This status might indicate that the required configurations for the legal entity haven't been completed. From the list, you can directly access the Released product details, Product attribute maintenance, Product category maintenance, Default order settings, and Text translations pages to complete the required product setup.

Create a new released product manually

You can manually create a released product in a single run, depending on the organization's business processes and rules that are in place about whether this function should be used. This function creates a new product, and the workspace automatically includes a summary of tiles and two lists. The Open cases list shows and is released to the current legal entity. To create a new product, select Released products in the Released product maintenance workspace or on the Released product list page.