Revenue Cloud (formerly Revenue Lifecycle Management or RLM) is the latest and greatest Configure Price Quote (CPQ) solution from Salesforce. In this blog post series, we will deep dive into Revenue Cloud and compare features to the capabilities of Industries CPQ and Industries OM.
Start with our earlier posts before jumping into this post. See all the posts in this series below:
Product Catalog Management (PCM)
Product Catalog Management within Revenue Cloud offers several key features. It accelerates product launches with a centralized catalog solution that defines and launches products faster. It supports catalog-driven quoting and ordering solutions across channels and includes foundational features adaptable to various industries. By reducing errors in sales and service through catalog-driven processes, it enhances sales and fulfillment. The system improves business agility with unified sales processes within a digital platform, allowing better responsiveness to dynamic markets. Additionally, it provides a structured approach to managing product lifecycles, facilitating faster innovation.
Let's dig deeper into the key features and limits of the Product Catalog Management app. Access the app from the launcher, where the home page is neatly organized into customizable sections such as Catalogs, Products, Attributes, and Rules.
Catalogs
Catalogs are collections of products organized into categories for easier discoverability. Creating a catalog is the first step before adding categories and assigning products to them.
Similarities: This feature is similar to Salesforce Industries Enterprise Product Catalog (EPC), helping categorize products to make them series for customers and sales reps to find the product that suits their needs.
Differences: PCM allows creating categories or a hierarchy of categories under a catalog and then adding products to them, unlike SFI where you can directly child and parent catalogs and add child products at any level.
Attributes & Attribute Categories
Attributes define product characteristics, simplifying the management of details that make up your products such as bandwidth and contract term for internet services or color and storage for mobile devices. PCM uses Attribute Categories to group attributes and Attribute Picklists to represent all possible values.
Similarities: PCM supports reusability, attribute overrides, and defining attribute properties, much like SFI EPC.
Differences: PCM uniquely allows setting attributes as pricing-impacting, a highly demanded feature not available out of box in EPC, but can be done with light customization.
Attribute:
Attribute Category:
Products
Products can be simple or bundled. Simple products lack a hierarchy, such as fees, roaming, or Wi-Fi boosters, while bundled products consist of a group of line items sold as a unit. These products can be static or configurable.
Similarities: Revenue Cloud's Product Designer is similar to Industries Product Designer for building products, creating bundles, and managing cardinalities.
Differences: The Revenue Cloud's Product Designer UI has gone through a UI/UX make over and appears to be rewritten from scratch. The new design is cleaner, more compact, and noticeably faster than EPC's Product Designer.
Simple and bundled products are further classified into configurable or static products depending on whether you can configure products during run time or not.
Bundle:
Product Classifications
Product classifications act as product templates, simplifying attribute assignment and enhancing efficiency in introducing new products.
Similarities: This feature is similar to Object Types in Industries EPC.
Differences: Industries EPC allows configuring a hierarchy of Object Types to inherit attributes from parent Object Types to children, defining Product Specifications to have products inherit their product structure from the Specs, and managing different Product Versions, all of which PCM currently does not support.
You can assign a product classification during the creation of a product. This product will then inherit the attributes configured under that classification.
Rules Framework
Revenue Cloud features two primary rules frameworks:
Qualification Rules Framework: Similar to the Context Rules Framework in SFI EPC.
Configuration Rules Framework: Similar to Vlocity Advanced Rules.
The Revenue Cloud Qualification Rules Framework is powered by the Business Rules Engine (BRE), offering flexibility, robustness, and high customizability. By default, every product or product category in your catalog is qualified for sale, unless it is disqualified due to a rule not being satisfied.
Building Blocks of Qualification Rules
To effectively use qualification rules, you need to define these core components:
Objects: Rules are defined within objects. You can extend out-of-the-box qualification objects or create custom ones.
Decision Tables: These tables are based on objects and include the criteria fields used to qualify or disqualify products and categories. They enable faster lookup and criteria matching.
Qualification Rule Procedures: These procedures are used by sales channels to invoke qualification rules during selling processes. In Revenue Cloud, these procedures are integrated with product discovery to ensure the right products are presented to customers
Product Catalog Management Limits
Before planning and creating products, attributes, and bundled hierarchies, it's crucial to be aware of these limits:
Product Classification: Up to 200 products per classification.
Dynamic Attributes: Maximum of 15 dynamic attributes per product.
Product Bundle Hierarchy: Up to 3 levels (excluding the root product), 200 bundle components, 200 attribute overrides, 10 product component overrides, and 10 group component overrides.
Category Products: Up to 100,000 products per category.
Bulk Product Details API: Supports up to 20 product IDs per request.
See more details on Salesforce Help.
Closing Thoughts
The Product Catalog Management (PCM) module has a lot of striking similarities to Industries CPQ's Enterprise Product Catalog (EPC). Many things have been cleaned up and redesigned (for the better!), although some of the advanced features and concepts from EPC such as Product Specification and Product Versioning are not currently supported.
We look forward to deep diving with you into Salesforce Pricing in our next post.
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