Mapping products to services
A service describes what you offer. The mapping describes what you actually deliver.
These are two different things, and equipme keeps them apart on purpose. A service in your portfolio is an abstraction — a name, a price, a set of options a customer can choose from. Behind it sit concrete articles: a specific device with a specific part number, a licence, a shipping item, a production step. Service mapping is where you connect the two.
Until you do, nobody can fulfil an order for that service.
What happens when a service is not mapped
Nothing stops you from publishing an unmapped service. You can create it, activate it, display it in the marketplace, and customers can order it.
The order is not lost — but it does not move either. It appears under Fulfilment → Open positions with the status Waiting for mapping approval and stays there until you release a mapping configuration for that service. No purchase is triggered, nothing is picked, nothing ships.
Where you configure the mapping
Open Portfolio Management → Service portfolio, select a service, and switch to the Mapping tab.
Two things live here:
Fulfilment type decides who executes the delivery. In-house means the articles run through your own purchasing and warehouse. Dropshipping means the supplier ships directly. This setting is locked once the configuration has been released.
Bills of materials is where you define the articles themselves. Depending on how you have set up the service, you will see a base bill of materials and — if the service has options — variant combinations and additive options.
The base bill of materials
The base bill of materials contains everything the service includes on every booking, regardless of which options the customer selects.
Take an iPad service as an example. Every customer who orders it receives a protective case, no matter which storage size or colour they pick. The case belongs in the base bill of materials.
You add articles in two ways:
Quick search finds existing products in your product catalog
Add new product creates a new product on the spot, without leaving the mapping; Add multiple does the same for several at once
Products you reference here are procurement products — the same master data you manage under Portfolio Management → Product master data. Anything you want to map has to exist there first, which is why it pays to create all relevant variants of a device before you start mapping.
Stock items
When you create a product, you decide whether it is a Stock item.
The flag determines whether the article runs through your logistics at all. A stock item is a physical article: it gets purchased when needed, booked into the warehouse, picked, and shipped. An article without the flag skips all of that — a production step or a licence assignment involves neither purchasing nor a warehouse.
Getting this wrong is easy to miss, because the mapping itself looks complete either way. The consequences only show up later, in fulfilment.
Variant combinations
If your service has options, the base bill of materials is only half the picture.
Options are defined on the Options tab, and each option contains the values a customer can choose from. In the mapping, you tell equipme which articles belong to which combination of those values.
Back to the iPad. Three options — mobile data, storage, colour — combine into one specific device. Wi-Fi + Cellular, 128 GB, Space Grey resolves to exactly one product with exactly one part number. Change any of the three and it resolves to a different one. That is what variant combinations express.
Combinations that you do not offer can be excluded with the Combination permitted checkbox, so the customer is never able to order something you cannot deliver.
Options set up as Additive rather than Variant combination work differently: they are independent additions, such as an accessory, and bring their own articles without depending on other selections. The behaviour is decided per option, in the Mapping configuration type field on the Options tab.
When a one-to-one mapping is enough
Not every service needs an elaborate mapping. If you sell one specific device, with no options and no accessories, a base bill of materials with a single article is a perfectly good setup.
The abstraction pays off when you want the offer in your marketplace to outlive the article behind it. A service called Standard notebook can point at a different model next year without customers noticing, and without you rebuilding the offer. A service named after a part number cannot.
Both approaches work. It is worth deciding deliberately which one you want, because it is the harder thing to change later.
Releasing your configuration
A mapping configuration only takes effect once you release it.
While it is unreleased, you can change it freely without affecting current orders. This matters, because mapping a complex service takes time and you may well have the service published while you are still working on it.
Click Release when you are done. From that point the configuration is applied to all open and future items — provided no other mapping configuration was applied to them before.
To make changes afterwards, use Revoke release. equipme will ask you to confirm, because removing the approval means the mapping is no longer applied to customer orders until you release it again.
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