Product Catalog Management and Pricing Management release notes
Summarize
Summary of Product Catalog Management and Pricing Management Release Notes
The Washington DC release of the Sales and Order Management applications enhances Product Catalog Management and Pricing Management features. These tools enable organizations to create and manage product offerings, catalogs, pricing, and discounting strategies, improving the efficiency of sales agents in generating quotes, contracts, and orders.
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Key Features
- Product Catalog Management: Create commercial catalogs with sellable product offerings and associated pricing. Use product attributes and categories to organize offerings effectively.
- Pricing Management: Support account-based pricing and establish price lists tailored to specific customer accounts. Implement complex pricing strategies through price matrices.
- Entitlement Offerings: Create and manage various entitlement subtypes such as warranties and subscriptions, leading to service contracts.
- Product Configurator: An intuitive interface for agents to configure sales quotes and orders, automatically calculating prices based on selected options.
- Cost Books: Define unit costs for product offerings to help sales agents view costs and margins while creating quotes.
- Export/Import Functionality: Export multiple pricing entities and import them across ServiceNow instances, facilitating effective data management.
Key Outcomes
By utilizing the enhanced features in this release, organizations can expect improved sales processes, more accurate pricing configurations, and efficient management of product offerings. The updates also offer better performance through parallel processing of pricing transactions and enhanced customization options for pricing adjustments.
Important Information for Upgrading
If upgrading to the May 2024 release, a scheduled job must be run to correct the format of code values in the Standard Price Adjustment matrix. This ensures compliance with the new format standards.
Activation Information
The Product Catalog Management and Pricing Management features are included with each Sales and Order Management application and do not require separate activation. Depending on entitlements, customers can also install additional applications from the ServiceNow Store.
The Sales and Order Management applications include Product Catalog Management and Pricing Management features for creating and managing the product offerings, catalogs, pricing, and discounting strategies used in your organization. Your sales and order agents use these features when creating sales opportunities, quotes, contracts, and entitlements, as well as capturing orders. These foundational features were enhanced and updated in the Washington DC release.
Product Catalog Management and Pricing Management highlights for the Washington DC release
- Create commercial catalogs with product offerings that are sellable entities with associated pricing.
- Provide agents with an interface that simplifies the configuration and pricing of sales quotes and product orders.
- Support account-based pricing, which enables you to create price lists for selected customer accounts.
- Control the pricing of complex product offerings, including product and non-product attribute-based pricing, by using price matrices.
- Create cost books that define the unit cost of product offers, which enables sales agents to view product cost and cost margins when creating sales quotes.
- Export multiple pricing entities from one ServiceNow instance and import them to another ServiceNow instance by using the export entities feature.
See Product Catalog Management and Pricing Management for more information.
Important information for upgrading
If you used attribute characteristics in the Standard Price Adjustment matrix in the initial release of the Sales and Order Management applications, and you're upgrading to the May 2024 release of Sales and Order Management applications, you must run a scheduled job that corrects the format of the automatically generated Code values. Run the Schedule job to modify code field on characteristic records that contain special characters on demand job to replace any character that is not a letter (a-z, A-Z), a number (0-9), an underscore (_), or a dollar sign ($) with an underscore (_). This job corrects the Code value so that it doesn’t start or end with an underscore, doesn’t begin with a digit, and contains no consecutive underscores.
New in the Washington DC release
- Product Catalog Management features
- Product catalogs
- Define simple and configurable product bundles that have product offer hierarchies and associated pricing in product catalogs, product attributes, and product images. Use product catalog categories to organize product offerings in catalogs.
- Product catalog interface
- Browse catalogs to find products by categories or search in catalogs for products by SKU, name, or industry product codes.
- Entitlement offerings
- Create entitlement offerings in addition to product offerings. Define various entitlement subtypes, such as Warranty, Extended Warranty, License, or Subscription. You can also set up entitlement offers that result in service contracts.
- Product configurator
- Configure sales quotes and orders by using the product configurator, which provides an intuitive interface for selecting customer-requested product attributes. It automatically calculates prices as agents select order options. Product catalog administrators can define rules that control the editing and visibility of configuration options displayed in the interface, depending on the configuration state of the product offer.
- Needs templates
- Create templates with questionnaires that agents use to determine customer product needs and get appropriate product recommendations for sales opportunities.
- Pricing Management features
- Price list selection for quotes and orders
- Use a default price list based on currency, or set a default price list based on customer account to enable pre-negotiated prices for certain customers.
- Pricing matrices
- Enable pricing administrators to create attribute-based pricing strategies by using decision tables that control the attribute conditions applied.
- Pricing extensions
- Override the default pricing logic so that you can use pricing from external systems or define custom pricing logic needed for your business.
- Cost books
- Create cost books that define unit costs for product offerings. Your sales agents use this information in the Quote Management application to view unit costs for products and cost margins when creating quotes.
UI changes
- CSM Configurable Workspace support
- Starting with the May 2024 release of Sales and Order Management applications, you can configure product offerings, product offering catalogs, product pricing, and rules for context management using the CSM Configurable Workspace.
Changed in this release
- Product Catalog Management changes
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- Export and import entities: The Export Catalog option was renamed to Export Entities, which now supports the transfer of pricing entities from one ServiceNow instance to another, in addition to product catalog entities. You export pricing entities as JSON files, which you can then import to other ServiceNow instances. Starting with the May 2024 release, exporting product offerings now includes related characteristics and characteristic options.
- Configuration State Model API Framework: The configuration state model provides system methods that enable your developers to set and read configuration states when scripting with extension points to control node visibility and editability.
- Pricing Management changes
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- Matrix versioning: Create a matrix version when context variables change.
- Single or multiple rule configuration: Configure single or multiple rules in the Standard Adjustment Matrix. If multiple rules match and the option is marked true, all applicable pricing rules are applied when evaluating adjustments for product offers. If the option isn’t selected, the first rule based on priority is applied for adjustment calculation.
- Product offering characteristics in pricing matrices: Support product offering characteristics and options in decision rules for pricing matrices.
- Parallel execution of pricing transactions: Set system properties that enable the pricing engine to run parallel processing of pricing transactions, which improves performance.
- Extension point for pricing adjustments: Use the PricingAdjustmentsExtensionPoint to customize pricing adjustments that are defined in the Standard Adjustment Matrix or the Configuration Component Price Adjustment Matrix.
Deprecations
- The Enable single row match only with highest priority (sn_csm_pricing.matrix_result_single_match_record) system property for Pricing Management has been deprecated starting with the May 2024 release of Sales and Order Management applications. Use the Matrix field in the Rule selection criteria to set the priority for pricing properties for the Standard Adjustment Matrix.