Configuration Bill of Materials Rules

Overview

What are they?

A configurable Bill of Materials is a set of parts specific to a certain product configuration. For each configuration, where a product has a different set of parts, you can create a BOM.

How do they work?

When a BOM triggers, it appears to buyers on commerce document line item pages. If the parts contained in the BOM link up with the parts in the parts database, then parts pricing also appears on line item pages. Buyers see multiple BOMs when several apply to a given configuration. When the system triggers multiple advanced BOMs, which are created as strings, all of the strings appear concatenated in the order they were generated.

A BOM rule has a condition and an action. The values of the attribute(s) selected as the condition attribute(s) determine the result of the condition, which when true triggers an action. The action here is to display a list showing the parts description and their quantities. This list is shown in a separate tab in the pipeline viewer or in the commerce document.

Administration

Adding a new Rule

1. Navigate to the Bill of Materials: Rules List page.
   1. Click Admin to go to the Admin Home Page.

   2. Click Catalog Definition in the Products section.

      The Supported Products page opens.

   3. For the Product Family for which you want to create a Bill of Material rule, select Bill of Materials in the Navigation column and click List.

      The Bill of Materials: Rules List page opens.

2. Click Add to create a new rule.

3. Enter the rule Properties.

   This section is where you will enter basic details about the rule. For example, the name, status and where it will be applied.

   

   Label	Description
   Name	Enter the name of the rule. This is required.
   Variable Name	Enter a variable name for the rule. The Variable Name field populates automatically. Variable names can only contain alpha-numeric characters and underscores. The entry can be changed before saving, but after saving the value is read-only.This is required.
   Description	Enter a description, if desired.
   Status	Determine the status of the rule:  Active: Rule is fired when the condition is met. Internal: Rule is active only for FullAccess users; it is inactive for all other users. Inactive: Rule is not fired, even if the condition is met.
   Edit Start/End Dates	Select the box to open a date selector to set how long the rule will remain in the chosen status. If no duration is selected, the rule will remain on the selected status until you, or another FullAccess user, changes it.

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4. Select the rule Conditions.

   

   The condition section allows you to select the logic that specifies when a rule should run. There are three options: Always True, Simple Condition and Advanced Condition.

   • Always True: The rule will fire automatically, every time, because a specific condition does not need to be met.
   • Simple Condition: The rule will fire based on define condition attribute values that you select from a menu.

   • Advanced Condition: The rule will fire based on an advanced function written with BML.

     Conditions are returned as Boolean.

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5. Set the rule action: 
   1. Simple Bill of Materials:  Select if you know the parts you need to add. Click Add Row to add parts to the BOM string.

   2. Advanced Bill of Materials:  Select to write a BML script that assembles a BOM string. Click Define BML Function to create the script.

      The advanced function returns a delimited string. For example: MS001~1~IS001~3 (Part1~Qty1~Part2~Qty2)
6. Verify the rule is running by checking the Pipeline Viewer in Configuration.

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Bill of Materials Best Practices

1. Define Configuration options and values (for example, drop-downs).
2. Define BOM modules. This can be challenging.
3. Link BOM module part number(s) to option values. This typically takes the most time.

4. Write Bill of Materials rules to query tables and return part numbers.

   You can load Tables into Oracle CPQ from Excel.

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Related Topics

See Also