Convergys has introduced the second revision of its Product Control Manager, featuring enhanced support for product change management, dynamic data modeling and real-time integration with external systems, according to the company.
Product Control Manager 2.0 is a centralized product catalog and product lifecycle management system that supports the creation, management, dissemination, and use of product and service data, and it covers the full technical, commercial and price definition of products.
“We have seen a significant shift for service providers – in their customer base, competition, and in the market at large – all of which point to a need to introduce more products faster, and to make product management tools more responsive,” said Bob Lento, Convergys’ president of information management. “This latest version of Product Control Manager not only fills a gap left by existing product management tools that have not effectively consolidated product information across the enterprise, but reflects our deep understanding of the evolving needs of the marketplace, and incorporates insights we have gained over the past year from our successful deployments with leading service providers.”
Product Control Manager supports extended attributes, complex business rules authoring and execution, constraint processing, multi-user collaboration, entity revision management, lifecycle state management, a TMF SID-based data model and flexible integration support.
Product Control Manager version 2.0 delivers a number of enhancements over prior releases, including:
- Impact analysis and fast update: Users of the application, such as product analysts, product managers or marketing managers, are automatically alerted when changes occur in constituent definitions of products. The users can then compare different definitions to see what has changed, and if desired, incorporate the changes in the overall product model, Convergys said.
- Reference methods for dynamic data: This capability enables creating more flexible and dynamic product definitions that can incorporate data from external systems through use of pre-defined data look-ups. Administrative users can create, and then register, in Product Control Manager one or more value reference methods and/or validation reference methods, according to the company.
- Guided selling and enhanced metadata: This feature allows creating a richer description of products, where as part of the product definition, modelers can specify the desired presentation of product data by external systems (e.g., ordering portal). Product modelers can specify the sequence in which an orderable item in a product or a configuration choice is presented.
- Flexible pricing modeling: This functionality extends the pricing definition support to better manage pricing changes for products. Users can specify effective dates for pricing (start, end), associate alternate pricing plans for products (and change associations via rules), establish default pricing, which can later be revised or removed within the context of a given offering, and define comprehensive pricing rules.
