Understanding composition products and bundles

Composition products have strong aggregation relationships to their components or parts.

In some instances, product components can represent features that exist only as a part of the product. For example, a land line phone service is actually made up of a set of services that cannot be sold independently. The main service (the phone connection itself) can be associated with other services, such as call waiting, call forwarding, call display, and voice mail. Each of these sub-services is a product component of the land line phone composition product.

In other instances, a product component might be another product or service that can also sold and tracked independently. For example, a land line phone service might be combined in a bundle with other products such as cable television, wireless phone, and internet access to provide the customer with a single bill statement and discounted rates. In this example, each of the services would be a product component of a bundled product.

In the InfoSphere® MDM Product domain, a bundled product is modeled as a product instance with a product structure type of Bundled. The bundle components are related to the bundle product instance using a product relationship type value of 1 (Product 1 is the bundle to which Product 2 belongs; Product 2 is a bundle member of Product 1).

For example, consider the banking industry bundle depicted in the following figure. In this case, the product structure type Bundled on the product instance Regular Banking Bundle indicates that this product is a composition with the components Basic Credit Card and Regular Checking.

The Product domain provides users with the capability to retrieve the details of a bundle together with its product components as part of the getProductInstance transaction by specifying a value for RelatedProductInquiryLevel in the transaction request. The transaction response returns the composition's product components nested within the bundle product.

For information about customizing the retrieval logic for bundles, see Understanding product structure strategies.