Oracle CPQ Cloud is an enterprise-grade CPQ (Configure Price Quote) solution for today’s fast growing enterprises. This blog post aims to provide an overview on CPQ and how the CPQ solutions are applied in the sales cycle. Further, we will also explore the process of opportunity-to-quote-to-order process.

CPQ Overview

Basically, CPQ stands for Configure, Price and Quote and is predominantly a sales solution designed to assist enterprises with the following:

• Create accurate and highly configurable quotes.
• Store the products, pricing, and business rules together in a single system.
• Automate the sales process to ensure sales teams have access to everything they at their fingertips.

CPQ (Configure, Price and Quote)

Let’s look at each of these functions in detail.

Configuration

Customers or sales teams identify and select the products before creating a sales order. The process of identifying and selecting the products to meet customers’ requirements by providing certain inputs (such as the type of the product, quantity of product) is known as configuration.
Example: Customizing a car on an automobile manufacturer’s website to identify, which features fit in the budget or for that matter customizing your own lunch by choosing various ingredients available at a restaurant’s website within a specified budget.

Pricing

Once the product selection process is complete, customers/sales teams receive pricing details and applicable discount/promotion codes on the selected products. If necessary sales teams take further approvals, this process is termed as pricing.

Quotation

Sales teams create a proposal/quotation in a PDF/RTF/Excel format and share with customers before creating purchase orders. If customers’ have direct access to enterprise website or application they would directly receive proposal/quotation via email. The process of proposal/contract agreement creation is termed as a quotation.

Traditional Quoting Vs CPQ Tools

To appreciate the benefits of CPQ solutions, it is essential to understand the issues/problems faced by the traditional (manual) quote generation process. Here are some issues with the traditional quote generation process.

• Inaccurate calculations
• Loss of time and money
• Unapproved discounts
• Manual updates and maintenance (using spreadsheets)
• Dedicated Manpower (manual verification)

Key Benefits — CPQ Solutions

CPQ solutions automate the entire sales process and eliminate the above issues. Here are a few key benefits of CPQ solutions:

• Eliminates errors from complex sales processes
• Automates and streamlines the entire sales process
• CPQ tools considerably ease the approval process
• Being mobile compatible, it helps sales teams manage quotations on the go.

Oracle CPQ Cloud — Overview

Oracle CPQ Cloud, formerly known as BigMachines CPQ is the world’s leading cloud-based Configure, Price & Quote (CPQ) solution. The Oracle CPQ solution enables enterprises to streamline the opportunity-to-quote-to-order process, including guided selling, renewals/subscription, accurate price calculations and proposal generation. Moreover, utilizing the Oracle CPQ solution, sales teams can create quick quotes with 100% accuracy.
The Oracle CPQ Solution has a powerful rule engine on the configuration side, along with the approval and workflow process. Further, it has a flexible integration platform and can be easily integrated with leading ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools. Additionally, Oracle CPQ cloud provides SOAP and REST APIs that enable developers to easily access/update data using external systems.

Oracle CPQ Products

Oracle offers two types of CPQ solutions

• Oracle CPQ Cloud (SaaS) — caters to the requirements of large enterprises
• Oracle Express CPQ (Built on force.com platform) — is an ideal platform for small and medium-sized enterprises

Oracle CPQ Cloud Application — Components

Oracle CPQ cloud components consists of various verticals exemplifying the compatibility, design, integration, calculations, approvals, workflow, etc. An overview of its environment is detailed in the image:

Opportunity-to-Quote-to-Order Process

Here’s how the opportunity-to-quote-to-order process works:

• Opportunities are created in a CRM system; sales teams receive these and create quotations on the opportunity, post this the navigation moves to Oracle CPQ Cloud.
• Using Oracle CPQ, sales teams configure products and add the configured products to the quote in order to calculate prices on quote.
• Once the pricing calculation, discounting and all changes are completed. The sales team submits the quote to Order Management System through middleware integration.

Oracle CPQ Solutions – Cases Where It Can be Applied

Here are the various cases where the Oracle CPQ solutions can be implemented.

• B2B customers — generating high volume quotes.
• Assemble-to-Order (ATO) – A standard product where some components are held in stock and the product is finished after the order comes in.
• Make-to-order (MTO) – Standard products not held in inventory and made after a committed order comes in.
• Engineer-to-order (ETO) – Complex structures and customer specific projects, which were never built before and impossible to be handled with standard variations.
• Configure-to-order (CTO) – The products are assembled and configured based on a customer’s order.

Evoke’s — Oracle Consulting Services

Evoke Technologies has been providing Oracle Consulting Services for over a decade. We offer end-to-end consulting services for a wide-array of Oracle products including Oracle CPQ. Our team of expert Oracle consultants are well-trained and certified and have successfully implemented Oracle products for our global clientele. To learn more about Evoke’s Oracle CPQ solutions, call us today at +1 (937) 202-4161, or contact us through our website.

Author

Dhananjaya Rao Budireddi was a Technical Lead at Evoke Technologies. With his extensive knowledge and experience on Oracle CPQ Cloud, Salesforce and Java/J2EE technologies, he likes resolving customers technical challenges. Dhananjaya is passionate about technology and keen to learn and explore emerging cloud-based technologies.