Setting up specifications and product offerings

By creating and publishing versioned specifications and product offerings in a technical product catalog, your customers can order up-to-date versions of the products or services that they require. Your product catalog manager can create versions of the published specifications and product offerings with the required enhancements to support your customer's business, marketing, manufacturing, or operational changes.

Overview of product offerings with specifications

As a product catalog manager, you set up product offerings in a technical product catalog. A product offering contains the product description, pricing, eligibility, and product options. You use a product catalog to group your product offerings so that your customers can order the products or services that they want. Only published product offerings can be added to customer contracts.

The relationship between product offerings and the product, service, and resource specification determine how a product is fulfilled. Each product offering has the following components:

• Product specification

  A product specification defines the various aspects of a product including the following:

  • All the specification characteristic options that are available for a product, and how they should be fulfilled.
  • Various categories of information, such as the brand, cost, terms and conditions, and product-related materials, which include product visuals. Product specifications are customer-facing and are added to product offerings.
  • Its relationship to other product, service, and resource specifications, and how a customer order of a product offering is delivered.
  • Service specification

  A service specification defines a service, and the technical information of that service, including the following:

  • All the specification characteristic options that are available for a service, and how they should be fulfilled.
  • Various categories of information, including the cost, terms and conditions, and service-related materials. These resources include the service-related visuals and implementation guides. Service specifications can be customer-facing or resource-facing.
  • Its relationship to other product, service, and resource specifications.
  • Resource specification

  A resource specification defines the technical information for a resource, including the following:

  • All the specification characteristic options that are available for a resource, and how they should be fulfilled.
  • Various categories of information, such as the manufacture, model, and brand-related information about a resource, including the resource visuals and activation guides. Resource specifications are not customer-facing.
  • Its relationship to other product, service, and resource specifications. You can enable the product and service delivery by using the required resource.

• order-mgt-characteristics.md

• Create specification characteristics
  Define characteristics for a product, service, or resource specification.

• order-mgt-specification-rels.md

• Updating specification versions
  Enterprises frequently create and update new versions of product and service specifications. When these changes occur, it's important to update the existing product specification in ServiceNow®. Failure to update the product specifications can lead to difficulties with MACD (Modify, Add, Change, Delete) operation when orders enter fulfillment.

Parent Topic:Configuring product offerings and catalogs