Professional Services Industry (e.g. software services, training and certification industry etc.), sales process aligns to standard Sales process of a CRM application. The products and services sold are not too complex in terms of product structure and rules around it. However, every organization has different way of pricing and providing discounts to customers. CPQ Cloud offers a solution to meet the pricing calculation needs through configuration and customization options. Professional Services sales flow also ends with project creation to track the activities based on Services sold to the customer. This can also be supported via the CPQ cloud.
Let us look at the Lead to Quote to Project Use case for a Professional Services organization:
For most of the Industries, Quote to Order flow works well and hence CPQ Cloud integration with Order Management modules is readily available. However, there is no prebuilt integration between CPQ Cloud and Oracle EBS Projects. It needs to be established for this Industry specific use case.
In order to simplify this integration and determine what details will flow from CPQ Cloud to EBS Projects, we need to design the product such that all required inputs will be captured for subsequent project creation.
While a Service Offering is setup as a Product in CPQ, it captures attributes for Service Module, Role and against each role, details about location, rate, effort etc. Once a Service Offering is configured for a customer, it may have various modules that have several roles. Once all these details are captured against each role and activity, price can be calculated directly or Commerce process can be configured to apply pricing logic by reading other parameters like Customer rates etc. which may override manual entries or retain edits post calculations are done.
Once the quote is finalized and approved, the quote line item details for role, duration and effort can flow in specific format to EBS Projects to create project line items/activities for roles.
The solution provides the following key benefits:
Improved Quote Accuracy - A Quote may go through multiple iterations due to changes to various parameters. E.g. a role is expected at onsite for some duration, an activity duration is revised etc. CPQ Cloud automates pricing impacts to be calculated automatically for all these changes and maintains the Quote with accurate price as per planned resources for the project. Each time quote is reconfigured and submitted, it may require similar steps for pricing approval. CPQ Cloud can be configured to have approvals triggered for each change automatically.
Reduce Quote and Project data mismatch - As generally the Sales data is maintained in a separate system which may not be integrated with the project management system, it causes lot of problems due to data mismatch between what was quoted and what is planned for the project. The integration between CPQ Cloud and EBS Projects eliminates problems of data mismatch for activity durations, resource roles, rates etc.
Streamline Quote Revisions - It is a very common process to have some change request or amendment to the contract after the project has been initiated. CPQ Cloud offers Quote revision process to meet requirements for any amendments to existing project. With enhanced features like subscription ordering available now, CPQ cloud can be extended to manage change requests quote process for a project.
Here is a view of flow for amendments and change requests.
