Product master data
Services are what you sell. Products are what you buy to deliver them. Product master data is where the second half lives.
Everything you purchase in order to provide a service belongs here — devices, accessories, licences, and the internal work steps that go into a delivery. Service mapping then draws on this catalogue to define which products a given service actually requires.
That dependency runs one way, and it is worth knowing before you start: nothing can be mapped that does not exist here first. If a device variant is missing from your product master data, the mapping has nothing to point at.
You will find it under Portfolio Management → Product master data, split into three tabs.
Products
The Products tab is the catalogue itself. Each entry carries the details you need to buy the thing and to recognise it later:
Manufacturer part number — the manufacturer's own identifier, and in practice the most reliable way to tell two similar variants apart
Manufacturer and Name
Category — see below, this one does more work than it looks
Supplier — who you buy it from
Purchase price and Selling price
Categories are not just labels
A product catalogue sounds like it should contain hardware, and most of it does. But the Category field is what tells equipme how an entry behaves later, and not every category is a physical thing.
Alongside device categories such as Tablet or Headset, you will find entries categorised as Production step — internal work like setting up a notebook, applying an inventory label, or registering a tenant. These are real components of a delivery, they belong in a bill of materials, and they are managed here like any other product. They simply never get purchased or shipped.
This is why a bill of materials can legitimately contain something that looks nothing like a device.
Leaving a product in Not categorized is possible, but it makes the catalogue harder to search later and gives you nothing to filter on. Worth fixing while the entry is still fresh in mind.
Suppliers
The Suppliers tab lists the companies you buy from, along with the details purchasing needs: contact person, phone, mail, address, and your customer number with that supplier — your own account reference on their side, which is what makes an order recognisable to them.
Every product points at a supplier, so this list is a prerequisite for the catalogue rather than an afterthought.
Manufacturers
The Manufacturers tab is deliberately separate from suppliers, because the two answer different questions. A manufacturer builds the device. A supplier sells it to you. Apple makes the iPad; a distributor is who you actually order it from.
The list is short by design — name plus an optional comment. Keeping it tidy pays off in the Products tab, where the manufacturer column is one of the main ways to narrow a long catalogue down.
Keeping the catalogue usable
A product catalogue grows faster than anyone expects, and it degrades quietly. Three habits keep it workable:
Use the manufacturer part number consistently. It is the only field that reliably distinguishes variants that differ by storage size or colour, where names alone tend to collapse into each other.
Create all variants of a device up front, before you map the service that offers them. Building the mapping and hunting for missing variants at the same time is slower than doing either task on its own.
Categorise as you go. An uncategorised product costs nothing today and costs you a search every time you need it later.
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