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Oracle CPQ

Oracle CPQ

Overview

What is Oracle CPQ?

Oracle CPQ is a cloud-based application that helps sellers configure the right mix of products or services and create accurate, professional quotes to quickly meet their customers’ pricing needs.

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Recent Reviews

Oracle CPQ Review

8 out of 10
March 21, 2019
Incentivized
It's used by a Business segment. It manages the Pricing and Quoting solution. We create and renew quotes, agreements, renew those, revise …
Continue reading

Review

4 out of 10
March 20, 2019
Incentivized
Oracle CPQ is currently being used by the three largest sales groups. It allows the sales team to manage pricing within the constraints …
Continue reading
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 11 features
  • Quote sharing/sending (16)
    8.4
    84%
  • Configuration options (16)
    7.9
    79%
  • Product configuration (16)
    7.9
    79%
  • Price adjustment (16)
    7.3
    73%
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Pricing

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CPQ Pricing

$240.00

Cloud
per month per user

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Demos

CPQsuite Demo (7.5 minutes)

YouTube

Oracle CPQ Training | Oracle CPQ Certification Course Demo | What is Oracle CPQ | MindMajix

YouTube

Oracle CPQ Cloud Service 2017 1Z0-976 questions and answers|CertTree

YouTube

1Z0-436 exam Oracle CPQ Cloud Service 2016 Implementation Specialist | 1Z0-436 PDF Answers

YouTube
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Features

CPQ

Features related to configuring and pricing products and delivering quotes to customers.

7.4
Avg 8.6
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Product Details

What is Oracle CPQ?

Oracle CPQ is a cloud-based application that helps sellers configure the right mix of products or services and create accurate, professional quotes to quickly meet their customers’ pricing needs.

Oracle CPQ Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

Oracle CPQ is a cloud-based application that helps sellers configure the right mix of products or services and create accurate, professional quotes to quickly meet their customers’ pricing needs.

Conga CPQ, SAP CPQ, and PROS Smart CPQ are common alternatives for Oracle CPQ.

Reviewers rate Quote sharing/sending highest, with a score of 8.4.

The most common users of Oracle CPQ are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(54)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 44)
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Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Oracle CPQ is connected with Salesforce in our company. It's used by many of our major business groups to create quotes. Sales reps use it to configure quotes for potential orders.
  • Discount approval process
  • Price list
  • SFDC integration
  • Oracle support
  • Product stability
  • Scalability
The product comes with many limitations if tried to customize beyond a certain point. It's advertised as a transactional system so it doesn't support major loads. However, the product has robust out of the box features to support the sale process including discount approvals and also integration to SFDC via managed packages.
September 17, 2019

Oracle CPQ Review

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have implemented CPQ for some of our product lines, and it's used by users across the organization.
  • Drag and Drop UI.
  • Very fast and responsive UI.
  • Complex products with highly customizable options will be a challenge.
  • It has limited analytics features.
For small to medium complex products, Oracle CPQ is well suited. But for products which are highly customizable with more complex rules, it will be a challenge.
September 17, 2019

CPQ -- On Prem Combo

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It's used by our Sales Organization for addressing Agility, Cloud-enabled, and for better ease of maintenance.
  • Deployment -- faster.
  • Drag and Drop UI.
  • Mobile-friendly.
  • ETL draw.
  • Federal data security.
  • Direct DB connection to execute sql queries.
It is well suited for CPQ, commerce integration, and seamless user interaction.
September 16, 2019

Oracle CPQ Cloud review

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is going to be used across the sales organization for configuring our storage products. It was brought on to address agility, ease of maintenance, and for the move to a cloud-based solution.
  • Drag and drop UI.
  • No downtime for regular releases.
  • Better standard API Integrations with boundary On-Prem systems.
  • Direct database query capabilities.
Oracle CPQ is well suited for simple applications that require Commerce and CPQ capabilities. It may be less well suited for more complex/multi-level systems, as well as integration with on-prem downstream applications.
Billy Goins | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Oracle CPQ in our organization for:
  • Global configurations
  • Pricing
  • As a quoting tool
  • Allows users to configure products.
  • Strong pricing engine and the ability to do pricing approval workflows.
  • Allows for partner order placement.
  • UI/UX capability.
  • Admin capability.
Oracle CPQ Cloud has helped us to easily configure products.
March 21, 2019

Oracle CPQ Review

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It's used by a Business segment. It manages the Pricing and Quoting solution. We create and renew quotes, agreements, renew those, revise those, copy those, manage pricing, discounts, manage approvals through use of workflows, send notifications, create outputs, use reports, use multiple interfaces connecting to CRM, ERPS, integrators etc. in our system.
  • Configuration
  • Approval Workflows
  • UI
  • Data Handling Capability - It needs an internal capability for loading large amounts of data.
  • Version control
Its well suited for smaller businesses with pricing , quoting and configuration needs.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
we use Oracle CPQ for quoting and price caluclations. CPQ is our pricing engine and all our applications use cpq to derive final sale price.
  • attribute pricing for providing different discounts for different time commitments (e.g. monthly vs annual) -- other tools typically require you to create multiple SKUs
  • volume based discount
  • quoting
  • complex configurations as we have complex multi-level bills of materials (BOMs)
  • approvals and workflow / routing work well for our region based and threshold based approval process
  • PCI compliance
complex pricing caluclations and complex comfigurations
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Used by almost the entire organization. Using as a hub with multiple Salesforce orgs and home grown boarding platform.
  • APIs
  • Centralized hub
  • Seamless with Salesforce Cloud applications
  • User interface design - although now seeing big improvements with JET
  • Reporting - The data between Salesforce (our CRM) and Oracle CPQ need to mesh better. It should have a two-way sync for critical bits of information such as closed won and closed lost. Then the reporting would be better.
  • Customer Service for support questions and as a partner to offer ideas to our problems - only show up when it is time to renew
Well suited for: Complex rule engines for sales

Exposing these rules is not easy for reviewing with the business
March 20, 2019

Review

Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Oracle CPQ is currently being used by the three largest sales groups. It allows the sales team to manage pricing within the constraints required by finance.
  • It supports complicated calculations for pricing.
  • It allows us to adjust pricing based by sales group or partner group
  • It allows us to manage one group of products and add different pricing and constraints based on the sales group or partner group
  • The tables allow for updates without need IT code to be created
  • The customer service support when creating issue tickets takes a long time to resolve
  • The UI is not user friendly and requires a lot of clicks from the end user to navigate through the system.
  • The system management is not easy to use. The tables are not easy to manage or understand
The customer service support isn't helpful. It would be good to meet with a success manager on a quarterly bases to discuss business and IT issues the company is facing.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
It is being used by Sales community to create quick quotes and turn them into an Order in the Ordering system. It solves the sales problem of creating manual quotes to present to a customer which used to take days. With CPQ, the turnaround time has reduced significantly.
  • Guided selling with no room for error.
  • Generate professional looking quote document which can be presented to the customer.
  • Integration with Ordering system to seamlessly create an order.
  • There is no version control available today.
  • More granular level of admin logs.
  • System configuration look and feel need improvement. The tree-like structure to navigate back and forth between parent and child is totally unacceptable for our Sales users. They expect the child model to open as a modal within the parent configuration.
It is well suited for our Sales quoting and service contract creation. Less suited for our system integration kind of scenarios where the current CPQ UI is unacceptable by our business.
Francis Beiring | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
With Oracle Configure, Price, and Quote Cloud in place across our global operations, we have streamlined the entire quote-to-order process. The flexible and scalable cloud tool enables us to deliver a superior customer experience and supports our rapidly growing business for the long haul.
  • 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.
  • User interface needs updating.
  • Reporting Manager needs a big update. We also use Oracle Engagement Cloud and we are pleased with the BI Reporting. CPQ reporting needs some work.
Oracle CPQ Cloud is well suited to streamline approval processes and decrease quote-to-order time by eliminating paper-based processes with complex pricing lists.
Joseph R. Sweeney | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Part of my role in procurement was to analyze orders taken by our sales reps and project these figures into our annual budget as well as examine areas of potential growth. My role within CPQ Cloud was to access this data and communicate the findings with our executives. It allows for simple access and accurate reporting for taking orders and generating quotes.
  • Orders have always been accurate and we've never yet had an issue processing one
  • Pricing configuration allows for complex tiers within an organization's portfolio and so there are multiple options depending on your situation
  • Report building is simple and intuitive
  • Although reporting is intuitive, it could use a more robust reporting look and feel especially when it comes to graphical displays
  • Mobile view and approvals can be a bit wonky sometimes and need to be refreshed
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.
Michael Weissberg | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We chose to implement Oracle CPQ for our separate e-commerce platform on top of Oracle Commerce Cloud. It's being used across the entire organization to replace a home-grown custom solution for a wide variety of product lines that can be customized to extreme levels. We'd like to be able to offer more products and variations on our e-commerce site rather than relying on manual quotes and sales representatives, but we're limited by manpower and bandwidth to manually program in a lot of variables.
  • Allows us to offer a variety of options without manually programming in each individual product
  • Allows us to utilize a product feed with features and variants, which can also play well with Google Product Listing Ads (Google Shopping)
  • Maintenance does not necessarily require hard programming knowledge, so marketing communications can help maintain
  • 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
Our primary use case, that we feel it's well-suited for, is sitting on top of Oracle Commerce Cloud to allow more variants and easier quoting in our e-commerce platform. So long as it isn't a fully custom job, this allows us to offer more products and more variants that are easier to automatically price, saving us time and needed manpower (thus increasing profits). However, setup is a bit cumbersome and not always necessary - it's not cost always effective for even a few dozen products with two or three variables each - so we're implementing in stages to allow ramp-up to greater complexity. This allows us greater speed-to-market while building up capabilities. However, without a CPQ, we wouldn't be able to offer our full product line without either wrecking the consumer experience and/or a great amount of manual effort, including greater maintenance time and costs.
April 13, 2018

Oracle CPQ Review

Susan Fisher | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Oracle CPQ is being implemented globally as our sales & order entry tool.
  • Brings efficiency to the product set up & new product introduction
  • Controls pricing & discount process
  • Generates professional proposal documents
  • Administration screens could be easier to navigate
  • Favorites function is not user-friendly
  • UI is improving but needs a more modern look & feel
Oracle CPQ is perfect for the globalization of sales process.
Jason Parpart | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Oracle CPQ Cloud is our defacto system for generating customer quotes. Currently, our new equipment sales, aftermarket sales, and customer service groups are the primary users of CPQ, with the output from the system feeding Engineering and Order Entry. CPQ addresses a number of past issues, including reduced time from inquiry to quote, full visibility of the sales pipeline, reduction of errors, unified quote style and layout, and consistent pricing.
  • Incredibly powerful configuration rules engine
  • Offers flexibility to achieve almost any business need
  • Very well supported - Oracle is clearly investing in development of CPQ Cloud as updates to the system are regular and significant
  • Document generation systems need some work - Old Document Engine is very powerful, but not user friendly. Newer Document Designer is very user friendly, but lacks a number of features available in Document Engine.
  • CPQ Cloud has gone through some growing pains as part of BigMachines being acquired by Oracle. Many people on the sales side of Oracle still aren't very aware of CPQ, and don't understand how it fits in the big picture.
  • CPQ Cloud is in serious need of a UI update, but that is in the works for upcoming releases.
I believe Oracle CPQ Cloud would be a useful tool for any company that quotes and sells a product or service. The flexibility and power of the system are such that it can handle any magnitude of users, quote size, or business rule complexity. Unless the business is very straightforward and quote generation and business rules are very simple, CPQ Cloud would likely be a good fit.
Gary Sheppard | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Oracle CPQ Cloud to direct our sales people to the correct configurations of hardware solutions that the customers need. The system is used by nearly all sales branches and is being rolled out globally as well. The standardized pricing and quote output provide value to our customers and the data collection and reporting capabilities help our management stay up to date with sales and customer relations. Customer relations are being additionally improved by the integration of Oracle's CRM through a separate contract purchase of that software.
  • Directed sales is done very well by this software but you need dedicated administrators to create, update and grow the configurations.
  • Quote calculation and presentation are done well also.
  • The freedom provided by the administration back end can make the logic to become too complex and conflict, so the administrators need the power in the organization to draw the line on user requests.
  • Oracle has put a lot of effort into improving the document engine (to produce quote documents) but it still has it's headaches and limitations. It can pretty much do what the old engine did after years of development. But they dumbed things down a lot which is frustrating sometimes but will probably be good in the long run.
This is enterprise software that will be good for any large sales team. Startup companies should stay away until they get more established. A business would need to have a very diverse and customizable product line in order to really benefit from the high cost of this good and flexible system.
February 02, 2017

Success with CPQ!

Paul Shapiro, CPA | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Oracle CPQ Cloud is being used to provide our channel partners with a front end to configure products, get instant pricing, produce quotation documents, produce product drawings and link to product specification sheets. This information is provided to them in minutes instead of hours making our company easier to do business with. It is being rolled out systematically to our principal customers.
  • The system is very flexible, allowing us to do pretty much whatever we want with the customer experience.
  • Implementation consultants are VERY knowledgeable and picked up the nuances of our business very quickly.
  • Along with the flexibility comes some technical complexity. We are not fully up to speed on the technology needed to make all modifications to our product configurator without consulting assistance.
  • Oracle solutions are not cheap, nor are their consulting resources. We got what we paid for however.
The system is well suited for product configuration. Our pricing is not customer specific and accomplishing that, though possible, will be complicated.
Craig Jacquez | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use the B2B module from our server using SOAP transactions with our ERP system.
  • Documentation was pretty straight forward and useful.
  • Their server performance was good.
  • Their GUI interface was easy to use.
  • The use of CDATA in the XML isn't something to get excited about.
The BigMachines SOAP interface works as advertised and has proved to be quite reliable.
Uri Eshed | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • Streamline quotes.
  • Provide online repository of standartized quotes.
  • Allows transparancy.
  • Product too rigid, too many areas are not flexible enough.
  • Access rights management difficult to maintain and just not supported in too many areas (reporting, part search).
  • Lacking testing / debugging / configuration management tools.
  • Support and responsiveness poor.
  • If you are not in the mainstream of the product roadmap, usage or improvement roadmap cannot be seen.
Check well, how likely your organization is to change current processes and adopt new ones?
Can you draw what is the lead-opportunity-quote-PO-cash flow?
How clear are the product configuration definitions in the company?
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • BigMachines provide us with a central repository for all our products and services.
  • Allows all our technical sales staff access to configuring and architecting a complete end-to-end solution for our customers.
  • Speeds up the time it takes for our sales team to configure, price and quote a solution.
  • Error messages need to be more specific, in some cases, the message is so generic it's difficult to locate the issue.
  • The product needs the ability to modify and update itself. Updates to the parts catalog and data tables are file uploads or manual screen updates.
  • Reporting and report generation tools are very difficult to compose and update (Another example of where fault messages need to be improved).
  • More features and functionality with the BML scripting language.
  • More build-in screen formatting controls.
  • Ability to call a function with a function or UTIL.
I would hire a consultant or an experienced BMI developer for the initial build. Even if it's just for one product-line. They can show you a lot the product can do right up front. And help with the initial design. Trying to build the product without any experience will result in a lot of rework and changing directions with your build. They can also teach you how to navigate with the vendor and bypass a lot of trial and error.
Stephen Crane | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
At our company, BigMachines is used as the primary Sales quoting and contracting software. It is primarily used by the Sales organization (both internal Sales and District Sales Managers) to build out quotes and generate contracts and addendums for new and existing business. Sales Operations is the owner and is the admin of the software, along with IT, who facilitate the use of user licenses. The software is also used by the Product organization and is a key component in the Go-To-Market process by making new pricing generally available for sale. Business analysts work directly with IT developers to design user requirements when building out new quote products. The software helps to automate the contracting and approval process, making sure that specific quote products go through the correct discount approval channels. There is tie in with Salesforce as well, which has allowed us to generate Opportunities with Products reports and report on sales activities and KPIs for specific products.
  • Automation of discount approvals and protection of margin- This is probably one of the most widely-discussed features. Our ability to set maximum allowable discount thresholds is imperative, especially when there are hard costs like vendor or partner royalties associated with each quote product. You can really lock product discounts down at the line item level (though presents slight frustrations as well).
  • Configurable and customize-able - The code base is configurable and has allowed our in-house developer to develop some fully custom discount approval workflows. It can also be customized to program in maximum and minimum allowable values and graphical control elements like pop up menus, help text, list boxes, text fields, and other software components.
  • Ability to implement business rules based on business requirements (i.e. publicly traded company, Sarbanes Oxley) is a plus.
  • The software is great for implementing simple if/then logic (if X product is selected then Y product should also print on the agreement). Specific trigger rules can be written and implemented based on if/then criteria in order to meet business rules and scenarios. You can write as many quote requirements as you need.
  • Integration with Salesforce
  • One of the biggest challenges we've experience with the software is the lack of flexibility in deploying snippets of code changes to production. Unlike making changes in our Salesforce test environment, when deploying BM to a production environment our IT developer has to migrate a fully tested code-complete snapshot of sandbox to our production environment all at once. This presents challenges for IT when managing multiple projects from different areas of the business, specifically general sales availability expectations. In order to meet business deadlines, sprint cycles are managed against a floating deployment schedule to ensure that code for all projects are deployed at once.
  • While the software is customize-able, deploying more complex changes takes much time and effort. Dedicated programmers and business systems analysts are needed to define the business rules, document the programmed changes, and deploy the software to production. It takes time to learn and and train on the logic behind the scenes. User training is definitely required for more complex configurations. There is no automated wizard to walk-through test configurations (this would be a nice-to-have).
  • In a fast paced agile environment, the software is a little slow in how it integrates into business process, approvals, and Go-To-Market strategy.... at least in our business.
  • Navigation between configuration pages is a little cumbersome.
  • The software UI has been modified A LOT to make the user experience easier for the Sales teams. A lot of credit goes to the programmer but overall the software UI is still static and at times inflexible when compared to other new drag and drop/cloud-based wizard models.
  • Would be nice if there were integration with our billing system (this is a nice to have!) Product Catalog (SKU) management becomes very manual and all the more important when there is lack of integration with the billing system. We have to coordinate efforts with Billing, Sales, and IT to make sure that the product catalog stays clean and up-to-date.
  • While the ability to lock down discount allowables is a plus, this can also stall deals if allowables HAVE to be exceeded to win business (more of a process/culture change I know). Ad-hoc Emergency fixes can be deployed but you have to weigh the benefits against these "whirl-wind" resource costs.
If you're looking for a robust solution that is highly customize-able and configurable, BigMachines is definitely worth exploring. I wouldn't say that the software itself is slick, but rather, its configurable nature allows a talented programmer to implement some pretty slick solutions. The things our developer has been able to do with soft and hard floor discount approval rules is pretty cool. However, dedicated analysts are needed to help with documentation and user training because the software doesn't have a wizard interface. Also be sure to understand how internal business processes (like sales approvals, IT sprint cycles, and SarBox requirements) are impacted due to the strict bulk code sandbox-to-production migration requirements. A complete snapshot of the test environment has to be deployed all at once; this is a limiting factor in our fast pace agile environment (though we've adapted) where speed to market is imperative. Just make sure you can re-write processes if needed, dedicate time and resources to train users and document business rules. Also, make sure the business has a clear operational strategy when it comes to Product Catalog (SKU) management. This process may become very manual due to lack of billing system integration capabilities (based on what I've seen). End-of Sales efforts may have to be coordinated with Billing, Sales, and IT departments to during the SKU removal or clean-up process.
Nikki Flannigan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 2 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use BigMachines in the quoting of all sales and renewal pricing for our company, as well as to generate our contracts and order documents that we send to customers. It is used primarily by the sales team, with use by the renewals team as well. Our finance and legal departments have it as a guideline to ensure that pricing is quoted correctly and that contracts are uniform across all deals that we close. It solves the problem of standardizing our pricing and contract process. Makes quoting customers fairly quick and easy.
  • BigMachines is great for quickly putting together quotes and contracts for customers, making the process less time consuming than it would be otherwise.
  • The system integrates with Salesforce, allowing for integrated asset management.
  • Can automatically apply discounts.
  • Sometimes when BigMachines is required to prorate pricing, it does not seem to do it correctly and there can be a number of glitches.
  • BigMachines and Intacct round to different decimal points. Our company integrated BigMachines, Salesforce, and Intacct, and this causes slight variations when we invoice off an opportunity that has a BigMachines quote, as the three systems will have slightly different numbers.
  • The system seems overall very buggy. Our organization has faced different issues that have stemmed from BigMachines not doing certain things correctly, such as populating contract end dates on new assets.
I have used BigMachines for over three years and at two different companies. It is not a product that I particularly like from a renewals perspective, but it seems to work much better for our sales staff and they seem to have a more positive appreciation for it. I think it is great that it integrates contract documents with the pricing, which not only makes things quick, but keeps contracts uniform. Most people at our company do not find it to be particularly intuitive to learn, and I would be interested in looking for something that was more user friendly and had less bugs.
Dave Merullo | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • As with most CRM solutions, BigMachines CPQ engine provides best value when the toolset is optimized to align with the needs of the business. While this is an obvious statement, I've found that achieving alignment is sometimes the biggest challenge. But if the implementation is done right, BigMachines can dramatically transform the sales cycle and drive revenue to new levels. In short, the toolset is powerful and flexible but success hinges on collaboration between the team using it and the team developing/supporting it.
  • As a developer/admin, I've been able to deliver functionality within BigMachines that automates complex business logic, ensures accuracy of materials on a quote, includes quick and easy discounting with appropriate approval checking and renders to a variety of PDF proposals. Users have reported reductions in quote preparation time from hours to minutes.
  • Beyond the out-of-the-box features that simply get turned on/off, BML coding of utility functions and Rule administration allow creative and challenging solutions. For example, we were able to allow users to quote support/maintenance for variable terms across multiple products with existing or expired agreements with 100% accuracy. By writing a function that calculates a prorated price based on unit price and end date we were able to plug prorated pricing into any item being quoted. Prior to using BigMachines this was a big challenge which cost salesreps time and resulted in delays due to inaccuracy.
  • There are areas within the tool that are very difficult to troubleshoot and require assistance from BigMachines support. As a developer, this can be frustrating and limiting. For example, when the results of a configuration are added to an existing quote the data passes from "configuration" to "commerce" through what seems like an invisible portal. Improvement in visibility to this process would be of great value.
  • From an admin's perspective, a "developer mode" that shows whats going on under the hood while in commerce or config is needed.
  • The document engine is tough to work with, but BigMachines is commited to rolling out improvements. The latest update is that a complete refresh is on the way.
In my experience, having at least one resource in-house that knows how to develop and support BMI makes a huge difference. Leveraging the BOA process to analyze and document business processes is also of great value not only at the beginning of the implementation but periodically as well. Understand that familiarity from the users will promote ideas for improvement that simply cannot be identified in the blueprinting phase. Plan for continuous improvement and agile development.
Jim Kiltie | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • With most software you either customize the software to fit your process, or you customize your process to fit the software. BigMachines provides customization of its configuration and commerce rules, allowing companies the flexibility to fit to their processes, without requiring customization of the base code. This is not to say that BigMachines is perfect, but compared to the other products out there, BigMachines is far and above their competitors.
  • BigMachines listens to their user community's suggestions for feature requests. Their users also have the ability to vote on other people's suggestions. With 4 releases per year, BigMachines is always moving forward with adding features their users want.
  • The customer support structure at BigMachines is the most responsive I have ever worked with. Support is a very high priority for them, as is evidenced in their ramp up and training of support personnel. More companies should model their customer support after BigMachines!
  • The biggest problem I hear most about BigMachines is how difficult or complex it is to program pricing. I feel it is unfair to lay the blame for this on BigMachines, as each company has their own methods or algorithms for calculating sales price. But, to BigMachines' credit, they are always looking for new ways to make this easier for their customers, as was evidence in the release of the Pricing Rules and Formula Manager functionality. This functionality takes a lot of programming out of pricing and puts it in a format easy enough for non-programmers to work with.
  • My biggest complaint about the product is bulk migration. BigMachines keeps moving in the right direction toward granular or package development, but the way the product works now I must have all of my development completed before I can migrate from my test to my production environment. This forces me to make "live" changes in production for emergency fixes. BigMachines continually adds functionality to their roadmap to enhance this functionality.
If you want a successful implementation of BigMachines you will need:
  • Executive sponsorship that is actively involved in the the implementation and will help drive user adoption
  • Well documented configuration and pricing rules
  • An implementation team that understands your company's sales, finance, manufacturing and procurement processes
  • Knowledgeable consultants to implement BigMachines using best practices
  • For larger companies, trained system administrators to support and maintain your BigMachines environment (BigMachines offers Yellow and Blue Belt training...I highly recommend both!). For reference, support for our 90 users is split about 75-25% between myself and a consultant.
  • For sustainability, an engaged Sales Operations team who stays current with configuration rule changes and additions and can interface between the product teams and your BigMachines system administrator
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
BigMachines is being used across the organization - 4 Business Units. It eliminated major pain points of creating proposals to sell our products.
  • Sales Driven approach
  • Powerful Commerce Module
  • Document generation
  • Approval Rules
  • Migration capabilities from TEST to PROD
  • Document Engine
It is well suited for sales reps or a sales driven approach.
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