Overview of product offering versions

You create product offering versions for an existing product that you are improving. You typically create versions of product offerings by combining new versions of product, service, and resource specifications. Proper versioning enables your customer service agents to know what the latest versions of your product and service offerings are when they sell more expensive, complementary, upgraded, or related products to your customers.

Creating versions of product offerings

When you create a version of a product offering, do the following actions:

1. Create and assign a version number in each of the product, service, or resource specifications or product offering records that are affected by the changes. To reflect the engineering changes that were made to the physical product, edit the following data that is associated with the product offering version:
   • Characteristics
   • Characteristic options
   • Product specifications
2. Create the required specification relationships, decomposition rules, and attribute mappings for each specification in the new version. To learn more, see:
   • a4cd4fbe682dde8af750d10b1518f09ff9ab6048.dita
   • bf5de20e1f5fbc744bbe7b1638555b41759475be.dita
3. Create the product offering, and then publish it when you update your product catalog.
4. Retire or archive old or unused specifications, and product offerings. To learn more, see 96c26780aa2f82a4edcdd41b03ee5ee6e4439a05.dita.

Updates and validations that are performed when you create and publish a product offering version

When you publish the updated product version, additional validations are performed on your edits. To learn more, see the Updating and validating copied rules for a new specification version section in a4cd4fbe682dde8af750d10b1518f09ff9ab6048.dita.