Hi,
Imagine you are working on a project where the client's business has hundreds of products such as a Telecommunication company. When you ask for a list of products they deal with, they give you lengthy brocures with rates, tariffs etc. How would you go about transforming those flashy brochures into MS CRM Products with different categories, product lines, price bundles etc.
Here I describe a step by step technique to import your whole Product Catalog that includes Units, Unit Groups, Products and Pricelists.
> Gather a list of all possible categories, types, map those into one or more MS CRM fields on Product entity : example Product Type, Subject etc.
* Subject can be really useful in terms of grouping products for Knowledge base articles and Cases are you would generate Cases for select Product; and Sales Literature categoriazation.
> List down those categories in a CSV file, import Sujbects, refer to one of my previous posts on this.
> List all the Unit groups and individual Units for each unit group and transfer those into MS CRM Unit Groups and Units using Import tool.
> Create a list of Product names, codes etc. organize the details into a single CSV file and Import it.
> Create Price lists for different currencies and special occasions like Christmas, Thanks giving day and Customer classes : Gold, Premium etc.
> Now comes a tricky part, you have the Subjects, Units and Products linked to those and different Price lists, how do you generate Price list items ??
> For this create a CSV file with fields similar to those shown below :
Product Name (lookup) | Price Amount | Price list
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Product 1 | 45.56 | Rs.
Product 1 | 1 | US Dollars
Product 1 | 0.64 | Pound Sterling
Product 1 | 0.8 | US Dollars Thanks giving day Special
As you can see, you have to replicate rows for each different combination of Price amount, Price list type for the same Product.
> Once you have build this CSV file in the above format, Import it and your product catalogue is complete.
Drop a line if you need to contribute more to this, I will be posting a detailed article with screenshots and sample CSV files for you to try.
Imagine you are working on a project where the client's business has hundreds of products such as a Telecommunication company. When you ask for a list of products they deal with, they give you lengthy brocures with rates, tariffs etc. How would you go about transforming those flashy brochures into MS CRM Products with different categories, product lines, price bundles etc.
Here I describe a step by step technique to import your whole Product Catalog that includes Units, Unit Groups, Products and Pricelists.
> Gather a list of all possible categories, types, map those into one or more MS CRM fields on Product entity : example Product Type, Subject etc.
* Subject can be really useful in terms of grouping products for Knowledge base articles and Cases are you would generate Cases for select Product; and Sales Literature categoriazation.
> List down those categories in a CSV file, import Sujbects, refer to one of my previous posts on this.
> List all the Unit groups and individual Units for each unit group and transfer those into MS CRM Unit Groups and Units using Import tool.
> Create a list of Product names, codes etc. organize the details into a single CSV file and Import it.
> Create Price lists for different currencies and special occasions like Christmas, Thanks giving day and Customer classes : Gold, Premium etc.
> Now comes a tricky part, you have the Subjects, Units and Products linked to those and different Price lists, how do you generate Price list items ??
> For this create a CSV file with fields similar to those shown below :
Product Name (lookup) | Price Amount | Price list
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Product 1 | 45.56 | Rs.
Product 1 | 1 | US Dollars
Product 1 | 0.64 | Pound Sterling
Product 1 | 0.8 | US Dollars Thanks giving day Special
As you can see, you have to replicate rows for each different combination of Price amount, Price list type for the same Product.
> Once you have build this CSV file in the above format, Import it and your product catalogue is complete.
Drop a line if you need to contribute more to this, I will be posting a detailed article with screenshots and sample CSV files for you to try.
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