Oracle CPQ vs. Oracle Siebel CRM

I think CPQ had worked so well for our company because of the widespread nature of our associates and tracking orders that were being placed in multiple time zones. My team specifically needed a way of analyzing these orders to track our progress in real time and sort out any supply orders before they became an issue. If you are in a centralized location with a smaller team then this may not yield much use to you.

Incentivized

As an end user, I would not recommend this solution for enterprise deployment. Lack of support for modern browsers, slow performance, and poor searchability - these things set Siebel CRM in the rear of the pack. There was no great mobile solution either, so that can be bothersome especially for road warriors like myself.

Incentivized

• Leveraged automation to minimize headcount costs despite 10% year-over-year business growth, and enabled staff to focus on more strategic tasks.
• Established a flexible CPQ system that scales on demand to easily accommodate the company’s multiple global locations.
• Improved customer relations by reducing configuration time and allowing sales more time to meet with customers and close orders.

Incentivized

• Great data model: the out of the box version comes with standard objects that support most of the industries business models: Finance, Communications, Utilities, Public Sector, Life Sciences to name a few.
• Ease of implementation: implementation is done by configuring standard objects or creating new objects; additional level of customization via script is also possible.
• Lots of resources available on the product
• Supported by Oracle one of the world leader in IT
• Multiple developers can configure and test concurrently in their own workspace and then merge the result in the main application.

Incentivized

• Significant setup time, cost, and maintenance. We have to use an implementation partner
• Does not always play well with other software, even Oracle software. While this is improved and being further improved, that it was a third party acquisition means things sometimes require a little extra care
• Additional setup documentation and first walkthroughs would be helpful, especially if it was all in one place

Incentivized

• Migrations between environments is one area that could be improved, with tools to compare and move data elements (source vs target).
• Easier ways to identify, through email or a web page, the health of the overall system (components, marketing campaigns, tasks, servers, etc).
• The UI seems to be improved with the newer versions of Siebel, but I believe it requires a lot of new features. It seems that other CRM solutions that are cloud-based are putting a lot of emphasis on the Usability and presentation, things where Siebel may need to catch up...

Incentivized

So far it is all good with BigMachines, looking for new features since Oracle acquisition has created a lot of expectations. We have outlined our limitations (out of box functionality) in our periodic customer successor advice meetings for a while, hope we get a resolution soon. Also, the BigMachines user license fee has increased a lot in the last three years.

Incentivized

The software UI can be as complex or as simple as you need it to be (depending on the business). It does require training others on quote configuration and the order in which to build out order positions prior to configuring a quote. Once users are trained;however, it is fairly straight-forward. The UI is still more static than other new wizard/drag-and-drop models, but it get's the job done

Incentivized

Oracle Siebel CRM is an older Sales CRM, so many of it's features aren't as current as ones used today. However, it has a smoother and easy-to-use UI. We're glad that we can still access Oracle Siebel CRM because it's easier to find older information that we can't easily find in our Salesforce Lightning CRM tool.

Incentivized

Other than one day two years ago and an hour or two a few times since then due to data center outages, it has been very reliable

It depends upon the day however there are so many failure points with online services, including our internet service, that this is probably closer to 9 with the latest version

Some specific support personal was good and fixed some problems fast using proper solutions. But when one of them went to sleep when we had critical issues and they do unreported commits to our production environment which caused issues and they were hiding it?? you can not give more than a two (maybe even that is too much). They also failed to add a feature for us which also bring the grade down.

We no longer have support for our Oracle Siebel CRM. When we did, the support was slow to get some things fixed, therefore, there was a lot of downtime. Of course, this slowed down our overall productivity and increased our overall frustration with the tool. However, it would be nice if we still had some support with it since we still do access it from time to time.

Incentivized

They have pretty good training. Our business analysts have been able to go to entry and advanced level training. They have a train the trainer model. Our business analyst attended training, then trained the rest of our staff.

It was a much more technical implementation than we thought. It involved much more code.

Future releases have made and will make administering the tool easier.

EDL consulting had one good developer, but when he was moved off, they were horrible to work with.

The BMI sales team does a “BOA” or a “Business Operation Assessment” which is extremely valuable, not only for them to scope an implementation and get more reach within the organization, but it is also a documentation of business process that most organizations don’t have. It highlights inefficiencies and allows for correction during implementation.

Having a dedicated team (in-house) for implementation is key

Oracle engagement is ahead. They are active in the development of the tool and provide great support after implementation. They also listen to their customers and offer opportunities to feedback and provide input through activities like the customer advisory board forum.

We also connect to Oracle Business Intelligence, which is not even an option of the list of products above (that's always encouraging when products are missing from lists!) This connects to campaigns in Siebel along with users writing reports based on data from Siebel. I don't think OBIEE stacks up that great with other systems because it seems to be lacking in reports, and those who can make them have to be quite technical. Oracle Database I think stacks up because of how robust and speedy (at times) it can be

Incentivized

• Increased Sales Rep efficiency. Being able to create multiple quotes ACCURATELY and quickly was a game changer.
• Large implementation time. It's a little difficult to fit BMI into a SCRUM style build, with multiple working models and prototypes of all 3 simultaneously.
• A larger fee for licensing and implementation cost. ROI wouldn't be realized in the first year.

• This has all my company needs for sales analytic. It has helped our call center and the sales portal become more lean and require less resources for their day-to-day.
• We use its research and direct email capabilities and use it to target specific groups of potential clients. We have seen an improvement of nearly 20%.
• We have clients who have used a few modules like bill summary, campaign management and customer information. Oracle Siebel CRM has helped them reap ROI within a year from going live.