Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 Product Families

In this post we’ll review the new Product Family feature. When adding a product you now will add it as a Family, Bundle or Product. This is also known as the ‘Product Structure’.  The out of the box sample data for CRMOnline comes with this feature (as well as the new capability to add associations for recommending products to users on opportunities). I will be adding to this post over the coming weeks to provide you with a practical use case that you can use in the real world as a user and as a CRM administrator to help better manage your product catalog and offer Product suggestions during the sales cycle.

If you have been using Microsoft Dynamics CRM for any length of time up until the rollout of CRM 2015 you will know that the Product Catalog hasn’t changed since version 1.2. I have implemented Microsoft Dynamics CRM in many companies across North America and I can say that only a handful of companies have used the out of the box Product Catalog and Price List functionality. For most customers they need a robust Product Catalog beyond what the out of the box solution offers but the nice thing is that Microsoft Dynamics CRM is extremely extensible and just because I haven’t been able to implement the out of the box Product Catalog features, this has never presented a technical barrier for creating exactly what the customer needed, we have simply used the XRM capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics CRM to create what we needed! The product area within Microsoft Dynamics CRM can be quite involved so we’ll take this from a high level and only focus on a few small components of the product family.

Adding Product Families

You can add a product as one of 3 choices:

1. Product Family
   1. This is a top-level Category and as I mentioned in the product visualization post, you can nest product families.
2. Product Bundle
   1. This is a bundle, like the former kit (which is still supported) and can belong to a family.
3. Product
   1. This is the underlying product that belongs to a Family or a Bundle.

Viewing Products

The Product Views now display the new ‘Product Structure’ field that depicts the type of product: