Product Life Cycle

In the previous step, you learnt about product families, which lets you group and categorise products, making it easier for you to manage them. Now you will see how the entire process is tied together from beginning to end.

Create

When creating a product record, you will need to populate a product ID. This could be related to an identification number already associated with the product of a number you create.

Keep in mind that the valid to and valid from date fields do not have supporting business logic out of the box so the record will not progress through its life cycle automatically as dates are reached.

Products can be created in bulk using the Import Wizard.

Revise

At times, opportunities are open for an extended period. During this period, the associated product may change or retire. In such cases, the opportunity must still be taken through to completion.

When you revise a product and change the properties, Dynamics 365 automatically creates a new version of the product and copies the product details from the existing product to the newer version. The new product version has all the details including price lists, product relationships and properties.

The already-created opportunities with the older version of the product can continue to refer to the older version of the product. The opportunities that are created after the product is revised or retired will refer to the current (newer) version.

Revert

If you need to abandon changes to the properties of a product you can revert the changes and continue with the last active version of the product. To do this, select Revert. This changes the status of the product back to Active.

Clone

You can save time creating new products, product families and product bundles by cloning an existing record. This creates a copy of the original record with all the details except for the name and ID. If the product, bundle or family has any properties, they’re also copied to the cloned record. These inherited properties can be overwritten in desired.

Retire

Product records can be retired after they are no longer needed. Retiring a product maintains history but prevents it from being sold.

In the first step of the next activity, we will learn about creating and managing quotes.