Technical product catalogs

  • Versão de lançamento: Australia
  • Atualizado 12 de mar. de 2026
  • 9 min. de leitura

    • Technical product catalogs have a framework for defining the technical products, services, and resources that you want to sell to your customers.

    Technical product catalog entities

    Technical catalogs have different specification entities that separate the customer-facing and non-customer-facing information from the technical and market information:
    Product specification
    Customer-facing product information.
    Service specification
    Both customer-facing and non-customer-facing service information.
    Resource specification
    Non-customer-facing technical resource information.
    The framework for technical catalogs is aligned with the TM Forum Shared Information/Data (SID) data model, which is an industry-standard data model for the telecommunications industry.

    The following entities, including the previous specification entities, are central to the framework for technical catalogs.

    Tabela 1. Technical catalog entities
    Entity Description
    Characteristic Options that are available for a product. The characteristics are generic. You can associate them to one or more product, service, or resource specifications to describe the product, service, or resource attributes. The characteristics can have one or more characteristic options.

    To learn more, see Create product characteristics and characteristic options.
    Specification category Product, service, and resource specifications that are associated with a model category for reporting and workflow generation purposes.

    The specification is also associated with a model category, which determines if the ServiceNow AI Platform creates an asset from a configuration item (CI), and to what asset class it belongs.

    To learn more, see 6671690ddb2513b5a5a722e2cd069aacb558c038.dita.
    Product specification Product that a provider sells to the customer. This specification is a template to capture various characteristics. Examples are a product including the brand, cost, terms and conditions, and product-related materials, such as product visuals.

    To learn more, see 6836ef54634893fa1d42adea3df9f4416e35b6e3.dita.
    Service specification Technical information, which is in a template that defines the various aspects of a service.
    • A service specification includes cost, terms and conditions, and service-related materials such as service visuals and implementation guides.
    • You can use these specifications to define customer-facing services (CFS) and resource-facing services (RFS).

    To learn more, see b833f2a636aae2c9c057912b2a1b0bde9922ad23.dita.
    Resource specification Technical information, which is in a template that defines the aspects of a resource. A resource specification includes the manufacture, model, and brand-related information about a resource, such as resource visuals and activation guides.

    To learn more, see Create and publish resource specifications.
    Specification relationship Relationships between the product, service, and resource specifications and how a product offering is decomposed, fulfilled, and delivered after a customer order is received.

    To learn more, see aa7a7b1e352b0a3ea86aeee206275ac4d1ff79a6.dita.
    Decomposition rule Decomposition rules that are created at specification relationship levels that determine how a product decomposes into associated services.
    Product offering How a provider wants to sell a product. A product offering contains customer-facing information, such as the product description, pricing, eligibility, and product characteristic options.

    A product offering in a technical catalog is associated with a product specification. A single product specification can be used to define unique product offerings for different market segments with different pricing.

    To learn more, see Create product offerings.
    Product offering catalog Similar groups of product offerings that are targeted for a market or customer segment. To learn more, see Create a product offering catalog.

    Product Catalog tables and their relationships

    The following diagram shows the tables and the relationships that make up the Product Catalog data model.
    Figura 1. Product Catalog data model
    Infographic displaying the workflow of the product offering catalog. For the more information, refer to the text that follows.
    The Product Catalog data model uses a combination of tables to store data:
    • Tables that are included with the Order Management product.
    • Tables that are from the IT Asset Management application.
    • ServiceNow AI Platform tables.

    Example product offering with specification entities

    Each product offering has a product specification, which has the characteristics that are associated with it. Specification relationships define the relationship between the product service, resource specifications, and how a customer order of a product offering is delivered. Service and resource specifications also have characteristics that are associated with them.

    The following diagram shows how the entities work together to structure a product offering for a 4G mobile plan:

    Figura 2. 4G mobile plan
    4G mobile plan hierarchy chart that shows the product structure, explained in the following text description.
    1. In the diagram, the All in One Mobile plan is defined as a product offering that uses 4G Mobile line product specifications. These specifications contain the required characteristics and associated characteristic options.
    2. The 4G Mobile line product specification is associated with the 4G Mobile Service service specification, which is a composite service specification. It contains three other service specifications: voice service, data service, and SMS service.
    3. The SIM card uses a resource specification that is required to activate the mobile services.

    Catalog versioning

    By creating and publishing your versioned specifications and product offerings in a product catalog, your customers can order up-to-date versions of the products or services that they require. Your product catalog manager can create versions of the published specifications and product offerings with the required enhancements to support your customer's business, marketing, manufacturing, or operational changes.

    Overview of catalog versioning

    As a service provider, you define the products, services, and resources in your product catalogs so that your customers can decide what to purchase from you. Examples of some items in a product catalog might include cell phones, routers, calling plans, and services that you offer. You can offer some of these items in packaged bundles to your users.

    Your catalog items continue to evolve over time to accommodate the changes that are related to how your items are sold, configured, and delivered to your customers. Typically, these changes are related to engineering improvements that make your products, services, and resources more marketable and appealing to your customers. The changes usually are to the fit, form, and function, characteristics, characteristic options, and specification relationships of your catalog items. For example, an internet router may evolve over multiple revisions to support changes that are related to pricing and internet speeds.

    As a product catalog manager, you create new specification and product offering versions for your products. 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.

    Benefits of catalog versioning

    You can use the catalog versioning functions to do the following actions:
    • Create specification and product offering versions for your products.
    • Track the changes and revisions to your products, services, and resources as different versions.
    • Revise and publish catalog offerings that support multiple versions of specifications and product offerings.
    • Use the latest versions of specifications and product offerings that are published in your product catalogs during order capture, decomposition, and fulfillment.
    • Reference the specification and product offering versions in an inventory.

    Product catalog experience with the CSM Configurable Workspace

    View information related to all catalog items and work items on a single page.

    The product catalog landing page is built on the CSM/FSM Configurable Workspace. Users with the following roles can log in and view this landing pages:
    • sn_prd_pm.product_catalog_admin
    • sn_prd_pm.product_catalog_manager
    • sn_prd_pm.product_catalog_viewer
    For more information on these user roles, see Assign user roles in Sales and Order Management applications.

    Product catalog admins, managers, or viewers navigate to the CSM/FSM Configurable Workspace to view the product catalog landing page.

    With the workspace experience, product catalog managers can create and manage entities quickly and easily, without navigating through several pages and related items of a product offering. Additionally, they don’t need to track related entities while navigating to understand the product hierarchy. They can view the complete product hierarchy with all the related entities on a single page. The enhancements include:
    • Landing page with widgets based on the user persona.
    • Lists and forms available in the configurable workspace.
    • Complete hierarchy of a:
      • Product offering
      • Product specification
      • Service specification
      • Resource specification

    Product catalog landing page

    The product catalog landing page provides a high-level overview of all your product catalog-related information.

    You can get a consolidated view of all your product offerings, specifications, their status, and the performance. You can customize the landing page according to your requirements. The grid-based layout makes it easy to add, remove, or group available components. To modify the landing page, follow these steps:
    1. Navigate to All > UI Builder and select CSM/FSM Configurable Workspace.
    2. Select Product Catalog Landing Page.
    3. You can modify the page in one of the following ways:
      1. Create a copy of the existing page. Modify the duplicate copy according to your needs and replace the existing page.
      2. Directly modify the existing page. In this case, any enhancements made to this page may be lost during an upgrade and any new features won’t be available.
    For more information, see UI Builder.

    Infographic displaying the product catalog landing page. For the image description, refer to the text that follows.

    Important Items

    This section provides an overview of the important items that must be addressed. You can view the number of draft and published product offerings and specifications and drill down to the associated pages for more details.

    Performance

    This section shows a graphical representation of:
    • Specifications by state: Shows a breakdown of the distribution of the specifications based on their state (published, draft, retired, or archived). Select the pie chart to drill down to the specific status page.
    • Product offerings by state: Shows a breakdown of the distribution of the product offerings based on their state (published, draft, retired, or archived). Select the pie chart to drill down to the specific status page.
    • Product offerings and specifications creation trend: Shows the number of product offerings and specifications created during a specific period of time.

    Recent items

    This section helps you track the product offerings and specifications that you recently edited. Select a Number or Category link to drill down to the Details page.

    Manage product catalog entities from the CSM Configurable Workspace

    Create and publish product offerings to a product catalog from the CSM Configurable Workspace to define how you sell your products to your customers.

    Antes de Iniciar

    Role required: sn_prd_pm.product_catalog_admin, sn_prd_pm.product_catalog_manager

    Procedimento
    1. Navigate to Workspace > CSM/FSM Configurable Workspace.
    2. Select the List menu to view the list of catalog entities that have been defined.
    3. For each type of catalog entity, you can do the following:
      • Select New to create a new entity.
      • Select on an entity in the Draft stage to navigate to the Details page. On the Details page, you can Save, Publish, or create a Copy.
      • Select an entity that is in a Published state and click Retire or Archive.

      See b49fa4cedb5824d737415f2634eac7195c8d2e16.dita for more details on these tasks.

    Product catalog hierarchy

    View the complete hierarchy of a specification (product, service, resource, or product offering) and ensure that all entities have been defined and associated correctly.

    The hierarchical view provides a high level view of how the product offering or product specification has been defined, the services which enable that product to be realized, and resources which are required to deliver those services. This helps product catalog managers to easily understand and validate the product and ensure that the supporting services and resources are designed as required to efficiently deliver new products. The hierarchy also highlights the relationship between two specifications.

    To view the product catalog hierarchy, navigate to the Product Offering Details page and click the Catalog Hierarchy tab.


    Infographic displaying the product catalog hierarchy tab view along with the workflow and other details. For the text description, refer to the steps that follow.
    This diagram shows every level of the product hierarchy:
    • Product offering
    • Product specification
    • Service specification
    • Resource specification
    • Specification relationship between two entities
    On this page, you can:
    • Click on an item in the hierarchy. The selected item is highlighted and details are displayed on the side panel. Click on the Open Record icon to drill down to the Details page.
    • Click the Legend icon to view the type of items or nodes available in the hierarchy.
    • Select a product specification or product offering to display its related entities while hiding the other entities.