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"Our Product Managers have designed hundreds of products, for different needs and market segments …

Yet, our sales staff and channel reps are recommending products in isolation, without evaluating the suitability and eligibility of all available products for a transactional situation.

This is leading to deviations from Product Management intent…"

Innovative Product Management departments design hundreds of products after conducting a thorough study of various micro-segments and their needs. In order to realize the intended results of these strategies, and to monitor the strategy on a continual basis, it is important that the field recommend products, as per the definitions and guidelines provided by Product Management. If these definitions and guidelines are not automatically enforceable, the field will end up making recommendations that could deviate from Product Management intent. When this happens, the targeted benefits of the Product Management innovations are lost.

To deliver on this goal, a flexible and powerful Product Guidance infrastructure is needed. This infrastructure has to be able to support multiple operational challenges encountered by enterprises…

• Search for Products and Market aligned Bundles & Packages using multiple search criteria like Products & Families based categories, Customer Need Families, etc. Typically, Product Guidance Infrastructure tend to support searches of Products and Market aligned Bundles & Packages only through internal facing search categories like Products,Product Families & Sub Families, etc.This has the risk of losing prospective customers who want to be guided based on their Needs & Goals, and these customers may be attracted to competitors that have the capability for outward-looking search categorizations like Customer Need Families.
• Support Guidance complexities for “Packaged” products that are prevalent in multiple industries like Insurance, Banking, High Tech, Telecommunications, Media, etc. Product Guidance Infrastructure in these sectors is expected not only to recommend the right package for a customer situation, but also fine-tune the specific features and options within the Package and its constituent sub-packages for that customer situation. This problem falls within the purview of the science of “Product Configuration”. Most traditionally engineered Product Guidance Infrastructure providers do not use Product Configuration science within their technology and this makes such systems unable to scale when Packaged Product complexity is high.
• Support Individualized Product Guidance wherein suitability and eligibility of Product(s) for different situations can be determined through rules processing. This can also be manifested as a search for eligible Products wherein the complete Product portfolio is evaluated before making a recommendation.
• Enable non programmers to author and test Product Guidance definitions & logic through easy-to-use GUI tools. Products, Market aligned Bundles & Packages can be rapidly synchronized from Product Master Tables; or rapidly defined and maintained from an easy-to-use GUI environment . Different types of rules i.e. Product Availability Rules, Product Eligibility Rules, etc. can be rapidly defined and tested without depending on software programmers. Graphical visualization to manage Guidance logic for Complex Product Packages and Bundles, with multiple levels of sub-packages can also be supported. Product Configuration logic to fine-tune Product,
  
  Package and Bundle Features for each customer situation can be rapidly defined and tested. Search-categorization hierarchies can be rapidly configured, both inward-looking based on Products & Families and outward-looking based on Customer Need Families. This can eliminate the delays and translation gaps associated with more traditional software development and change processes wherein business writes up detailed specifications documents and hands over to IT for programming.
• Integration with Enterprise Systems: The Product Guidance Infrastructure can serve different audiences like Sales Teams, Channel Sales Reps, Customers, CSRs, etc; as part of Multiple Processes like Customer Acquisition, Ordering and Servicing. Systems like CRM Systems, Sales Tools, Channel Partner Portals, Ordering System, etc can seamlessly access the Product Guidance Infrastructure. The user interface driving the guidance can be seamlessly embedded within these systems.

ValueMomentum Services
ValueMomentum is assisting Insurance and Lending Enterprises implement enterprise-wide, bodies of knowledge that can render product configuration advice consistently across different Lines of Business (LOBs), touch points, channels and private label clients. Financial (Insurance and Lending) products are complex and sales situations require deep knowledge of how products can be configured. By providing sales teams access to such a body of knowledge and thereby freeing sales people from having to know detailed information on each product, thus helping Clients support more sales regions through existing product specialists and achieving a more non linear co relation between sales and costs.