About product modeling

The Zilliant CPQ product modeling feature enables you to define product rules based on a product's characteristics. Depending on the product rules defined in the product model, the system applies logic to perform the Bill of Materials (BOM) explosion. The BOM then uses the product model to determine range restrictions, attribute visibility, and values.

The internal price engine also uses the configured data and exploded products to calculate the overall price or cost of sales documents.

As shown in the following illustration, the product modeling feature models products by using the product BOM, attributes, knowledge base, rules, and scripting.

The product modeling process comprises the following primary tasks:

• Create a product
• Define product characteristics
  • Attributes
  • Group and subgroup
• Define product BOM
• Define product rules
  • Range Restriction rule
  • BOM Explosion rule
  • Conditional rule
• Calculations

Product modeling terminology

When working with product modeling, you should be familiar with the following terms:

• Product modeler—Understands the product's business need. Defines structural information about the product and bill of materials (BOM) explosion rules.
• Attributes—Attributes of a product. An attribute is further defined as a dynamic data attribute (DDA) or dynamic symbolic attribute (DSA).
• BOM explosion—Process of creating, according to defined rules, subline items of a configurable product based on the product bill of materials.
• Default BOM explosion—When the main configurable product is added to a sales document, one or more of its BOM products is also added.
• Conditional trigger—Rule that the configuration engine can execute if a condition is true.
• KBClass—Holds the attributes or characteristics that define a classified product. A classified product can attach to a KBClass and create a different default value for each KBClass.
• KBSnapshot—Copy of configurable KB or classified KB to which a user can assign default values.
• Knowledge base—Product model that contains dynamic attributes, layout, and trigger (conditional) information. Useful for range restriction and BOM explosion.
• Global Precision setting—Scales numeric value data according to the precision property defined in SettingPrecision. In the application, this is located under Master Data Management > Setting Numeric.
• Schema—Product schema. Lists all standard attributes that a specific product has.
• OnType—Specifies the domain business type. It is mainly used in price engine and config engine to help a user choose from available values.
• OnAttribute—Specifies business type attributes, such as objectName, objectERPId, objectExternalId. With the help of onType and onAttribute properties, Zilliant CPQ can gather attribute values about the onType property.
• searchExpression—Expression to search through a quote at runtime.