Product Families 

When you publish the contents of an MDM repository of product information, records often need to be organized into a more granular structure than that provided by the categories of the taxonomy. This increased granularity often involves grouping main table records based not only on the category but also on other criteria (such as the manufacturer). Product families provide a way of organizing and identifying these groupings.

A product family is a group of main table records that are related by one or more common fields and/or attributes having the same value, and that may also have additional fields of family data, such as an image, a logo, a paragraph of descriptive text, bullets of specifications, and so on.

Product families enable master data to be efficiently published not only to paper, but also to non-paper media such as the Web in a manner that preserves the presentation and organization seen in printed catalogs, with the added benefit of fast, efficient search.

Most master data management systems require that product families (of which there may be thousands) be manually created. Further, they require that main table records be manually added to the families, and also that they be manually moved to a different family if changes in the record result in its no longer belonging to its original family.

In other systems, a product family may be referred to as a presentation, a unit, an ad, or a module.

By contrast, the MDM system uses an innovative approach to structuring, storing, and maintaining product family information that overcomes the shortcomings of other master data management systems. It embodies patent-pending technology that intelligently automates the creation and management of product families, while at the same time preserving family integrity across changes to the family structure, changes to main table records (including adding and deleting records), and even changes to the taxonomy itself.

Layering the family hierarchy on top of the taxonomy hierarchy leverages all of the planning and work that went into developing the taxonomy in the first place.

For more information, see Product Families.