Understanding Product, Pricing, and Catalog Setup

PeopleSoft Order Capture uses the following object elements: product data, a pricing engine, and a catalog.

This chapter discusses:

Products, PeopleSoft Enterprise Pricer, and catalogs.
Product setup.
Pricing setup.
Catalog setup.

Products, PeopleSoft Enterprise Pricer, and Catalogs

This section previews the integration of products, pricing, and catalogs with PeopleSoft Order Capture.

Products

Product definitions provide the foundation for many features of PeopleSoft Customer Relationship Management (PeopleSoft CRM), including product ordering, catalogs, and catalog searches. Product records are also used by PeopleSoft Advisor to create the Advisor dialogs that are accessed from within PeopleSoft Order Capture and PeopleSoft Order Capture Self Service.

You can use many of the elements used to define products—such as product brand, product category, product group, and product attributes—to dynamically generate catalogs based on criteria that you specify. For example, you can create rules that select only certain brands for inclusion in a catalog or that include products based on their attributes.

Pricing

PeopleSoft Enterprise Pricer enables real-time, dynamic pricing on quotes and orders based on company pricing policies. PeopleSoft Order Capture users define rules that determine which discounts, surcharges, giveaways, and conditions apply. As products are added to a quote or an order, PeopleSoft Enterprise Pricer applies all of the pricing rules that match the defined conditions to determine a final price. Conditions might include number of products ordered, type of customer, or customer region. The same pricing engine also allows customer service representatives (CSRs) to manually adjust prices and view all price adjustments related to an order or a quote.

Catalogs

The PeopleSoft CRM Catalog contains a hierarchy of products that PeopleSoft Order Capture and PeopleSoft Order Capture Self Service can access. You can access catalogs from different locations within the collaborative selling suite of applications. Users can navigate directly to Catalog Search and enter search criteria in the search dialog box, or configure the PeopleSoft CRM portal homepage to display a catalog search pagelet. You can also navigate to the catalog by using the order form.

Note. To navigate to the catalog by using the order form, you must have the PeopleSoft CRM Portal Pack installed.

Using the order form, CSRs can search catalogs for product information. PeopleSoft Order Capture Self Service customers can also view catalog information.

In addition, you can restrict user access to a product by validating it against a catalog when the product is added to an order.

CSRs and customers can also access the product catalog by way of PeopleSoft Advisor dialogs, and CSRs and customers can launch PeopleSoft Advisor from the catalog to retrieve product recommendations based on dialog interactions.

Product Setup

To define products and packages in PeopleSoft CRM, you:

Create definitional elements to associate with product elements such as product brand, product category, and competency codes.

These are reusable attributes that you associate with product IDs in step 2 to create unique product and package definitions.
Create the product and associate definitional elements (as well as other product attributes and parameters) with the product IDs.
Assign product units of measure on the Product Attributes by UOM page.
Define package components on the Package Components page (for products defined as packages).
Establish product prices using the Product Price page (for individual products and packages with top-level pricing) or the Product Component Pricing page (for packages using component-level pricing).
Define product relationships on the Product Relationships page.
Associate standard or custom notes with products on the Notes page.

Pricing Setup

Documentation on how to set up and use PeopleSoft Enterprise Pricer appears in the PeopleSoft Enterprise Pricer 8.9PeopleBook.

See PeopleSoft Enterprise Pricer 8.9 PeopleBook.

Catalog Setup

PeopleSoft CRM enables you to define the layout and content of online product catalogs for internal and external use. You define the look and feel of catalogs by creating display templates, and then define the contents that you want to organize and present according to your template definitions. You can designate products for inclusion in a catalog either by direct association (using product IDs) or by creating business rules to dynamically build product content based on the selection criteria that you define. Similarly, you can control user access to catalogs (as well as tailor catalogs to users) by directly associating user IDs with specific catalogs or by setting up business rules to establish permissions.