Need more info on the Product Object and how it is used

[Pamela London]

I am looking for documentation on Products.  I assume 'Product' is an Object.  Is it used in a hierarchical manner?  What is the purpose of Product?  If my company wants to move towards attaching Projects to Products do you have any suggestions for how to do this?

[Stephen_Slaughter]

Hi Pam,

 

Yes, a Product is an object. It's a Non-Project Investment Object (NPIO) and typically part of an investment Portfolio.

 

The purpose of the Product object and the PPM features related to this object is to store and process key data for New Product Development (NPD) investments and to extract and analyze insights from this data (e.g. reporting). Many of the attributes and objects associated with Product instances are the same as those for Projects and other NPIOs (Team, Financial plans, etc).

 

Products can have hierarchical relationships with other parent and child investments for Financial rollup. 

 

Establishing a hierarchical relationship with Project investments is one way that you can 'attach' a Project to a Product. There could be other ways to achieve this, so I will let other community members chime in about that....

[Sarmistha_Purkayastha]

Thanks for the great summary about the PPM Product object. Since most of this object behavior is similar to the Project object and other NPIOs, we do not have any specific documentation for the Product object. We have the following definition in the glossary for NPIOs: "Non-project investment object. Certain functionality for projects is different for other types of investments. NPIOs include applications, assets, products, services, and other work. To the extent they can be funded, NPIOs can also include programs, ideas, and custom subobjects of other NPIOs."

 

@plondon, if you have additional questions about the behavior of the Product NPIO object, do let us know. I can try and run that by an SME.

 

Regards, Sarmistha