In marketing, a product is a system made available for consumer use; it is anything that can be offered to a market to satisfy the desire or need of a customer. In retailing, products are often referred to as merchandise, and in manufacturing, products are bought as raw materials and then sold as finished goods. A service is also regarded to as a type of product.
Commodities are usually raw materials such as metals and agricultural products, but a commodity can also be anything widely available in the open market. In project management, products are the formal definition of the project deliverables that make up or contribute to delivering the objectives of the project. In insurance, the policies are considered products offered for sale by the insurance company that created the contract. In economics and commerce, products belong to a broader category of goods. The economic meaning of product was first used by political economist Adam Smith.
In its online product catalog, retailer Sears, Roebuck and Company divides its products into "departments", then presents products to potential shoppers according to function or brand. Each product has a Sears item-number and a manufacturer's model-number. Sears uses the departments and product groupings with the intention of helping customers browse products by function or brand within a traditional department-store structure.
The National Institute of Governmental Purchasing (NIGP) developed a commodity and services classification system for use by state and local governments, the NIGP Code. The NIGP Code is used by 33 states within the United States as well as thousands of cities, counties and political subdivisions. The NIGP Code is a hierarchical schema consisting of a 3 digit class, 5 digit class-item, 7 digit class-item-group and an 11 digit class-item-group-detail. Applications of the NIGP Code include vendor registration, inventory item identification, contract item management, spend analysis and strategic sourcing.
A manufacturer usually provides an identifier for each particular type of product they make, known as a model, model variant, or model number (often abbreviated as MN, M/N or model no.). For example, Dyson Ltd, a manufacturer of appliances (mainly vacuum cleaners), requires customers to identify their model in the support section of the website. Brand and model can be used together to identify products in the market. The model number is not necessarily the same as the manufacturer part number (MPN).
Because of the huge amount of similar products in the automotive industry, there is a special kind of defining a car with options (marks, attributes), that represent the characteristics features of the vehicle. A model of a car is defined by some basic options like body, engine, gear box and axles. The variants of a model are built by some additional options like color, seats, wheels, mirrors, trims, entertainment and assistant systems etc. Options, that exclude each other (pairwise) build an option-family. That means, that you can choose only one option by each family and you have to choose exactly one option. This kind of product definition fulfill the requirements of an ideal Boolean Algebra and can be helpful to construct a product configurator. Sometimes, a set of options (car features) are combined to an automotive package and are offered by a lower price. A consistent car definition is essential for the production planning and control in the automotive industry, to generate a master production schedule, which is the fundamental for the enterprise resource planning.
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Commodities are usually raw materials such as metals and agricultural products, but a commodity can also be anything widely available in the open market. In project management, products are the formal definition of the project deliverables that make up or contribute to delivering the objectives of the project. In insurance, the policies are considered products offered for sale by the insurance company that created the contract. In economics and commerce, products belong to a broader category of goods. The economic meaning of product was first used by political economist Adam Smith.
