Digital Commerce Support for Offer Specification

Extend Offer Specifications to your Digital Commerce solution. With Offer Specification, sales teams can simplify the creation of new offers and bundles and reduce product modeling efforts. With simplified offer creation, you can get to market faster. Offer Specification allows service providers flexibility for existing subscribers to manage in-life changes with purchased configurations.

With Offer Specifications for Digital Commerce, you can:

  • Decouple offers from specifications so current products are not disrupted.

  • Reduce product modeling effort. Product modeling is aligned to TM Forum standards for increased competitive advantage.

Enhanced Digital Commerce cache includes Populate and Regenerate API Cache jobs that are aware of Offer Specification design. Available specification types are:

  • Offer - Product Offering

  • Product - Product Specification

  • Service (not functional as of CME Summer ‘21).

  • Resource (not functional as of CME Summer ‘21).

A product specification is a product with specification type as product, which represents product offerings that are externally presented to the market. A product offering can be assembled from a reusable product specification.

A product specification describes the characteristics of what the customer can do after making a purchase. The product offering is the market vision, while the product specification is the effective component description, from the perspective of a service provider, that is leveraged to compose the product offering.

Product specifications cannot contain other associated product specifications.

Product specification subtypes consist of:

  • Simple product specifications with no children. This is a product offering with no children but can have an associated product specification. The associated product specification characteristics are mapped to the product offering. Characteristics can include rules, attributes, or applicable promotions.

    Product Specification - Simple product specifications with no children

  • Bundle (composite) product specification with children of specification type Product. This is a product offering with children but cannot have an associated product specification.

    Product Specification - Bundle product specifications with children

A Product offering is a product with specification type as Offer, which represents product offerings that are externally presented to the market. A product offering can be assembled from a reusable product specification, which is sometimes referred to as product spec.

Offer Spec only impacts Digital Commerce APIs when there is no support for Unit of Work (UOW) mode. Once support for UOW mode exists, the only impact to Digital Commerce APIs is for cases with override, which require validation. Validation is implemented as part of UOW support for the getOfferDetails API.

The Get Offer Details API retrieves the details of an offer, which can be a product or promotion, from a specified catalog. The offer details generated are the complete product details and product hierarchy for a product or the details of the promotions and their promotional items, along with the full hierarchy of the promotional item.

  • PCIs/DataStore: For a given offer, this API fetches the full product hierarchy using the Product Hierarchy service. The full product hierarchy and hierarchicalProductListGenerator generate the entire JSON result. The generated JSON result is converted to the offerDetail structure. If the input offer product is of type Offer Specification when using ProductHierarchyService and HierarchicalProductListGenerator, then building the hierarchy is not possible.

  • Products: Fetching a product with the type simple offer specification based on the current implementation does not allow for building the hierarchy.

Using ProductHierarchyService and HierarchicalProductList generator prevents fetching the full hierarchy for the product with a simple offer specification with an associated bundle product specification.

  • Promotions

  • Group Cardinality

  • Pricing

  • Overrides

V2ProductHierarchyService generates the hierarchy and JSON result. V2OverrideService processes any overrides.