If you are an operations manager or superuser, you are going to need to know how to configure your own products using IBIS. IBIS can assist you with product configuration which we charge for by the hour. This option could be the most cost-effective for you especially if you need to make substantial changes or your product configuration is quite complex. Please allow a lead time of up to 2 weeks for product or timetable changes, particularly during Sep-Dec.


If you intend on making a number of changes and you are not very familiar with how to configure products, it is always a good idea to let the team at IBIS know - especially if you are likely to contact critical support for assistance.


TABLE OF CONTENTS


Step 1: Set up a service

A service controls the maximum number of spaces available for the products associated with it. The service is fundamental to determining your product availability. If the system cannot find a service at the time you want the product to depart, the product will not be available.

  1. Open the Services screen. If you are using version 16.15 or lower, you will find this under the Products and Services menu.
  2. Click add and fill in the details. Customers using version 16.15 or lower, add a new row by clicking the + button at the top of the grid. Add a row
  3. Fill in the service code (10 letters or less, no spaces or apostrophes and once you have created this code, you MUST NOT CHANGE IT).
  4. Fill in the description of the service. This appears on the Specific Availability droplist screen.
  5. Set the duration of the service.  
  6. If the service is being used as part of a sector transport product, tick the has sectors box.
  7. If this service needs to be checked in, click the check-in required box.
  8. Click Save and close the screen.


Placing a * in the Exclusive products column (hidden by default) allows  a service to be filtered in the Resource Planner.

Placing a number in the Exclusive products restricts the number of places taken on a time slot in the Appointment Scheduler.

If the Check-in required box is ticked, the service will show on the Departures screen check-in Tab and in the Check-in module. 



Step 2: Set up a price code

A Price code allows you to allocate pricing to each product component shown on the Booking screen. To set up a new price code:

  1. Open the Price code screen, and add a new row by clicking the + button at the top of the grid.
  2. Fill in the Price code (10 letters or less, no space, apostrophes or other symbols). You cannot change this code once it is set up.
  3. Fill in the Description of the price code and select whether it can be Discounted or is liable for Commission by ticking the boxes.
  4. Set the online policy to Internal only. If the policy is set to inactive, the price code will be hidden by default.
  5. Click Save and close the screen.


Add a new price code


Step 3. Add a new product

To add a new product, follow these steps:

  1. Open the Operator products screen, then click Add. 
  2. Enter a product code (max 10 characters, no spaces). Once you have created this code, you can not change it.
  3. Enter the product name, this is how it will display to staff or customers booking the product online.
  4. Select your company contact from the Operator droplist (this should match the name showing in the Operator droplist at the top of the screen unless you are setting up new products for a business operating in a different location).
  5. In the Account column select your main direct account for your system.
  6. Choose the type of product from either:
    1. Activity - the most common type where availability is dictated by a standard departure schedule.
    2. Transport - a more advanced product configuration which involves sectors where pax are dropped off and picked up at different sections of a product.
    3. Charter - has no default departure time and is used to manage ad-hoc reservations by arrangement.
    4. Hire - for products sold via the Scheduler/Hire screens.
    5. Appointments - for products sold via the Scheduler Appointments screen.
  7. Set the online policy to internal only until you have finished all of the product configuration steps in this article.
  8. Save your changes.



Step 4. Build the product

Building a product ties together the product, price code and service. Each row in the Build Products screen is a product component. A simple product will have a single component, but a more complex product will have multiple components. Generally, you will have a product component for each service in your product.

  1. Open the Build products screen and select the Operator and Product from this droplists.
  2. Add a new row by clicking the + button at the top of the grid. Add a row
  3. Fill in the Code field (10 letters or less, no spaces or apostrophes). Each component code must be unique.
  4. Fill in the Name of the product component. Make this name meaningful as it will appear on the Booking screen for your frontline staff to see.
  5. Tick the Primary tick box if you only have one component. If you have multiple components, your primary component will be the component that the availability times work from. You can only have one primary component per product!
  6. Tick the Required tick box if you only have one component. If you have multiple components, at least one component must be required. E.g. you could have a jet boat product with a jet boat component and a transport component. The jet boat component would be required but the transport component would not, as pax may choose to self-drive.
  7. Specify the priority (e.g. 1) - if your product has 2 or more components, the priority controls the order these items appear in the Booking screen.
  8. Select the appropriate Service code and Price code from the drop-down lists.
  9. If your product has one component, the Time Sensitivity and Time Offset can be left as default. If you are building a multi-component product, you will need to adjust the time offset so that all the services can be found for the product. See the related section on Time offsets & sensitivities to help you with your configuration.
  10. Save your changes.
  11. If your product requires users to record a pickup or dropoff location, highlight the primary component row, then click the Details tab.
  12. Enter a caption in the Pickup or Dropoff field (e.g. 'Pickup' or 'Meet at'. Captions ending with a * will allow the pickup location to be edited by the user from within the Booking screen).
Looking for information on how to set up revenue codes? Find it in our article on how to setup revenue codes.



Build Products


Step 5: Set up price options

Price options are the items your customers, staff or agents can select when they book your products. Options are common to all products within the system, so you may not need to set up new options each time you set up a new product. E.g. Adult and Child options are typically common to all products within your system. 


If you need to configure a new price option, follow these steps: 

  1. Open the Price Options screen, then click Add. 
  2. Fill in the Option code (10 letters or less, no spaces or apostrophes).
  3. Fill in the Option name which will appear on the booking and your E-Commerce website if you have one. Do NOT use brackets () in option names if they will be used ONLINE. The max character limit is also 35 characters for display online.
  4. Enter the type of option:
    1. Person - Associated with passengers (e.g. Adult, Child, Student). An option of type "person" is counted as a "pax" on Reservation reports.
    2. Addon - Associated with lunches, or photo and video. Cannot be purchased online without an associated 'person' in the booking. 
      1. If you want customers to have the ability to add unlimited addons, you can set this against the price option under Online properties > Online attributes.. Set it to read: selection=unlimited
    3. Person addon - This differentiates a person from a normal addon, but won't allow the option to be purchased online without an accompanying 'person'. This is most commonly used for Spectators.
    4. Discount - This option type will trigger a $ or % discount calculation by the value specified in the option name (e.g. 20% discount). For more advanced discount configuration, see promotions.

      Consider how price options will be sold online and reported on in IBIS to get accurate pax counts. E.g. A Scenic Cruise that contains an optional Farm Tour add-on would need person options for Adult/Child/Infant on the Cruise component. The Farm Tour component would need 'addon' options called Farm Tour Adult/Farm Tour Child. Configuring the farm tour options as 'addons' ensures you do not inflate your pax counts on your reports and prevents the farm tour add-on from being booked online without selecting an Adult/Child Cruise option first. 

  5. Set the list order for this option to determine how the options should be prioritised in the Booking screen, or online. If the list order is set at 1000 or higher, the price options will be grouped under a 'More' button on the Booking screen instead of shown by default.
  6. Set the number of places this option will decrement your availability by. E.g. a 'Family' option might take 4 spaces, whereby an 'Adult' option would typically take 1 place, and 'photo and video' would take 0.
  7. Set the Edit policy to either No edit OR Internal only. If Internal only, users can amend the price in the Booking screen.
  8. If you wish to sell your product online, you must specify the online security policy for the price options you wish to show to agents or customers booking via your website.
  9. To allow discounts and/or commission to be applied to any price options, tick the Disc OK and Comm OK boxes.
  10. Save your changes.



Step 6: Set up seasonal pricing

You will now need to associate pricing for your new product. If you do not have a price season setup, see adding a new season).

  1. Open the Seasonal Pricing screen.
  2. Choose the Operator providing the product (most systems have only one, but if you have a large organisation you may have several).
  3. Choose the Season's start date.
  4. Check the Show field to ensure you are editing the Price INC GST, then click Refresh.
  5. Find the new Price code you set up for your product down the left-hand column, and use the arrow keys to scroll across the row to find the correct option code column.
  6. Enter pricing in all the cells for all appropriate options - include any FOC and % discount options by specifying the price as $0.00.
  7. Save your changes.
  8. Remember to repeat these steps for all future pricing seasons.

    update pricing season


Step 7: Set up departure availability

IBIS uses templates to allow you to maintain a default operating schedule for all of your services, along with their online policies and the max places associated with each. Learn more about how to manage templates. 

Please note if you are setting up a charter product, you may skip this step.

  1. Open the Setup template day screen.
  2. From the Day type droplist, select the appropriate template(s) you wish to update with your new departures. 
  3. Add a new row by clicking on the + button at the top of the grid.
  4. Enter the service start time in the Start Time column of your new row, then select your new service from the droplist column.
  5. In the Places column, specify the maximum number of places available on the service.
  6. If there is a minimum number of bookings to confirm the product departure, enter it in the Confirm column. Frontline users will see the confirmed tick in the Availablity screen when trips have reached the minimum capacity. 
  7. Set the online policy for the service if you want the departure to be available on your website or to agents using IBIS.
  8. Repeat for each service or departure time and note that you can make use of the grid functions for bulk actions.
  9. Save your changes.


Once your departures are configured on your template, you will need to apply your template to your Service Calendar. If you have already applied a template to your calendar, IBIS will not duplicate or change any existing departures, it will only add NEW departures which did not exist previously. See related article on timetable management for more info.


We recommend you only apply your template for a single day and then carefully check your new product configuration before applying templates across an extensive date range.
  1. Open the Service Calendar screen. 
  2. Choose the Start month and click Refresh.
  3. Click and drag your mouse horizontally and vertically to highlight all days you wish to apply a specific template to.
  4. Right-click on the highlighted section, then select Apply template day, and choose your template from the popup.
  5. When prompted with 'do you want to Build the day' you can say yes or no. All days are 'built' by default and the only difference is you will see a "B" on your calendar if you select yes.
  6. Depending on the date range and number of departures, the system may take a minute or two to update all the departures.
  7. When it is finished, the highlighted row will display vertically.
  8. Save your changes.
  9. Your departures will now display in the Specific Availability screen so you can make any additional amendments from here.


Step 8: Set up pickup or dropoff locations

If you offer a pickup or dropoff service for your product, you can configure a pickup list against the service. Ensure you configured the pickup or dropoff captions to show in step 4 or you will not be able to see it in the Booking screen.

  1. Open the Pickup location screen and select the Service from the list.
  2. If you already have an existing pickup list configured on another service, use the Copy button to update or click the + button at the top of the grid to add new rows.
  3. Specify the time offset for the pickup – E.g. if the pickup is 5 minutes before your standard product time, enter it as (5m).  If the pickup is 5 minutes later than the standard product time, enter it as 5m.
  4. Choose the name of the pickup location from the list, or type in a new one.
  5. Choose the online policy for the pickup location to determine which online booking profiles it is visible type.
  6. Decide whether this is the default location for your product – if it is, tick the Default box (you can only have one default per product).
  7. Decide whether it is a pickup or dropoff and set the tick boxes accordingly (it can be both).
  8. If there is an extra cost to the customer associated with this pickup specify it in the cost column - this will only apply an additional charge in the Booking screen, not online, however.
  9. Continue to add more pickups as necessary
  10. Click Save when you are finished.


Define Locations


Step 9: Specify the default email template

For any products sold online, you need to specify the email template to send for the confirmation email. Please note this step is only required if you have product and/or business unit specific email templates. Head to the Online Product rules screen and enter the name of the email template you want to send under the Fit email column of the new product that you just created. 



Restrict a product to specific times

There are cases where you may need to restrict the availability of a product to certain time slots, even though the service or services used for the product occur at more time slots. E.g. You may offer products at different prices at different times. 

  1. Open the Operator products screen.
  2. In the Restrict to times field (under Attributes), enter the time(s) you want the product to be available for in 24hr format, e.g. 11:00, 11:15, 14:00.  If you are using the Product List screen, the restrict to times field is under the 2. Details tab.
  3. Click the Save button to save your changes.
  4. Go to the Availability screen to check that you have achieved the desired result!

Restrictions can also be placed on certain pick-ups and price options, contact the IBIS team for assistance setting this up.


Time offsets & sensitivities

Time offset and time sensitivity will only apply to multi-component products.


The Time Offset of a component tells the product to look for the next service at a specific number of minutes (or hours or days) before or after the primary component. E.g., if the time offset for the component containing a jetboat service is 60 minutes, the product will look for jetboat services 60 minutes after the primary component time and will use it to build the product availability. You can also use negative time, for example, if the time offset for the component containing the jetboat service is (60) minutes, the product will look for jetboat services 60 minutes BEFORE the primary component time. You cannot have ANY time offset set against the primary component in a product!


The Time Sensitivity sets a time window within which the service can be searched for. If the time-sensitivity for a component is 5 minutes, the product will search for that component occurring after the primary component start time + time offset and before the primary component start time + time offset + time-sensitivity time. See the example below for an illustration of how this works.


For example, the following screenshot shows a three-component product where the product start time will be based on the Jet Boat component (as it is the Primary component).

  • The Transport to Glenorchy service will be searched for between 1hr and 1hr 5m before the primary component service time.
  • The Transport to Queenstown service will be searched for between 3hrs and 4hrs after the primary component service time

Multicomponent Product

If a product is a multi-day product then the Time Offset is specified in 24hr time format. E.g. 1 day plus 4 hours would be entered as 28hrs and the Time Offset field will format it for you.


Troubleshooting

You have now completed all the product configuration steps so you need to try and make a booking on your new product to ensure it works as expected. If it doesn't, carefully review the steps above to see where you might have gone wrong. Here are some useful troubleshooting tips to help you out.


I get an error message when I try and book the product

This is usually caused if the product code has been changed after the product was set up OR if there are 2 primary components ticked in the Build Product screen. To see if a product code has changed, check the product code matches the first section of the global key (i.e. the text before the @ symbol) in the Product List screen. If it doesn't match, amend the product code so it matches.


I can't see any pricing on the Booking screen
If you cannot see any pricing, ensure you have set up the pricing on the correct price code AND the pricing exists in the corresponding season. E.g. If you have applied departures in Sept but there is no pricing configured to start until Oct, then nothing will show. 


My product does not appear in the Availability tab
Firstly check the Specific Availability screen and ensure your departure has been applied on the day you are viewing availability for. If the departure is not there, you have not applied the template properly in the Service Calendar screen.


If you can see the service and you still cannot see your product, then most likely you have tried to configure a multi-component product and the time offsets are not quite right. You will need to check that the Time offsets you have configured in the Build product screen match the departure times of the services.


If this is not a multi-component product, your product may have a time restriction function enabled on it. From the Product List screen, highlight the product and click the Details tab at the top and check the restrict to times field. If this needs to be amended, adjust as required and re-save.