Overview

When you create a product catalog, you can create a vertical relationship, which is the relationship between your parent and child entities. Your product catalog manager can also enable a horizontal relationship,which is a relationship between product to product, product to service, or product to resource, by defining compatibility rules in the product catalog.

Using a horizontal relationship

The compatibility rules include the horizontal relationships between your product, service, and resource specifications. Your customers can now place orders for enterprise products where a product can depend on another product in the same or different product offering, like a sibling or a peer.

Let's look at an example of a horizontal relationship. The relationship between the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and an internet service is a good example. VoIP requires an active internet connection but VoIP and an internet service are defined in a different product hierarchy. With a horizontal relationship, you can define a relationship between VoIP and an internet service in the product catalog to support the order creation process for VoIP and to fulfill the order.