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.
Oracle CPQ Review
CPQ -- On Prem Combo
Oracle CPQ Cloud review
Oracle CPQ works for us
- Global configurations
- Pricing
- As a quoting tool
Oracle CPQ Review
My review with Oracle CPQ
Centralized Hub for Finance & Development - Oracle CPQ
Review
Guided Selling through CPQ
Accelerate Quotes and Reduce Costs
CPQ is definitely the 1-4-U
If you've got enough variables, then it's worth it
Oracle CPQ Review
Deep (not really) Thoughts of a 6 year CPQ Cloud Admin
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
- Quote sharing/sending (16)8.484%
- Configuration options (16)7.979%
- Product configuration (16)7.979%
- Price adjustment (16)7.373%
Pricing
CPQ Pricing
$240.00
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Product Demos
CPQsuite Demo (7.5 minutes)
Oracle CPQ Training | Oracle CPQ Certification Course Demo | What is Oracle CPQ | MindMajix
Oracle CPQ Cloud Service 2017 1Z0-976 questions and answers|CertTree
1Z0-436 exam Oracle CPQ Cloud Service 2016 Implementation Specialist | 1Z0-436 PDF Answers
Features
CPQ
Features related to configuring and pricing products and delivering quotes to customers.
- 8.4Quote sharing/sending(16) Ratings
Salespeople can share quotes and quote details with customers, via email, a customer portal, a personalized URL, or some other means.
- 7.9Product configuration(16) Ratings
Allows users to configure products and services by selecting bundles, constraints, options, preferences, etc.
- 7.9Configuration options(16) Ratings
Supports a robust, comprehensive level of detail around configuration options, including product features, services, quantity, etc. Options take into account availability and compatibility of selections.
- 7.4Pricing rules(15) Ratings
Determines price based on rules and hierarchies. Rules may consider customer demographics, availability, and/or product configuration.
- 7.3Price adjustment(16) Ratings
Sales users can adjust or override prices, based on coupons, discounts, markups, etc.
- 6.8Purchase history and open contracts(15) Ratings
Provides information about a customer’s previous purchases and current purchase/service agreements, which may factor into new sales or need to be modified to account for new sales.
- 7.4Guided selling/Sales portal(15) Ratings
Provides salespeople with tips, recommendations, or question sequences to help with product configuration and quoting, and/or to assist with cross-sell and upsell.
- 6.1CPQ reporting & analytics(16) Ratings
Users can report on and analyze CPQ processes. Metrics may include quoting cycle time, proposal acceptance rates, revenue, etc.
- 6.6CPQ-CRM integration(14) Ratings
Integrates to the company’s CRM to update the customer record.
- 7.3Attachments to quotes(16) Ratings
PDFs, contracts, videos, etc can be attached to quotes and/or proposals.
- 8Order capturing(6) Ratings
Allows the capture of orders of complex services and across multiple customer interaction channels such as - direct sales, contact center, point-of-sales, resellers, and customer self-service.
Product Details
- About
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Oracle CPQ?
Oracle CPQ Competitors
Oracle CPQ Technical Details
Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
---|---|
Operating Systems | Unspecified |
Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Comparisons
Compare with
Reviews and Ratings
(54)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-25 of 27)A great tool with not so great infrastructure
- Discount approval process
- Price list
- SFDC integration
- Oracle support
- Product stability
- Scalability
Oracle CPQ Review
- Drag and Drop UI.
- Very fast and responsive UI.
- Complex products with highly customizable options will be a challenge.
- It has limited analytics features.
Oracle CPQ Review
- Configuration
- Approval Workflows
- UI
- Data Handling Capability - It needs an internal capability for loading large amounts of data.
- Version control
Centralized Hub for Finance & Development - Oracle CPQ
- 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
Exposing these rules is not easy for reviewing with the business
Review
- 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
Guided Selling through CPQ
- 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.
Accelerate Quotes and Reduce Costs
- 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.
Deep (not really) Thoughts of a 6 year CPQ Cloud Admin
- 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.
- 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.
Success with CPQ!
- 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.
Robust software, highly configure-able but not without challenges
- 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.
An Admin's perspective on Big Success with BigMachines
- 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.
The best CPQ tool on the market!
- 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.
- 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
BigMachines - great Quoting Tool
- Sales Driven approach
- Powerful Commerce Module
- Document generation
- Approval Rules
- Migration capabilities from TEST to PROD
- Document Engine
Reverse Integration of Verizon's Business Solutions into Terremark's BigMachine leads to the 2011 Big Innovations Award
- BigMachines allows Verizon Sales Engineers to configure very complicated solutions across multiple product families (Cloud, Colocation, Network, Managed Services, Data Backup and Restore) while ensuring our companies with 60+ data centers can provision the services using our own provisioning processes and applications.
- BigMachines allows us to have multiple lines of business within the same application such as Partners, Public Sector, Commercial and internal business quoting.
- The BigMachine SaaS engine is pliable enough for us to reverse integrate Verizon legacy products and services into Terremark's portfolio, while adhering to the large company nuances that had to be added for a successful implementation.
- BMI has a segregated process and permssions for quoting the Public Sector services and Partner programs using different rates and discounting schemes.
- A migration of parts and data tables to multiple environments (Dev, Test, Prod) along with the ability to track changes at a granular level.
- BigMachines works best in Firefox but not as stellar in Microsoft Explorer. Our company compliant browser is MS IE and not all users can install Firefox.
- A New User Access process that will forward approval to a group of users. Managing a user list of 300+ is nearly impossible. BMI lists users by first name or last name, in a long, arduous listing like the old DOS days. NO ATTEMPT to update the user management portion has been addressed. Just missed promises.
- More advanced and granular discount and customer engineering approval processes and stages.
- Discouting works great and we segregate on 5 different layers.
- NOT Improved automated report generation interface and tools. It has rudimentary reporting capabilities that cannot be used during working hours or site speed/use is hampered. No changes to the reporting tool have ever been delivered since our initial use 5 years ago.
- Ever since Oracle purchased BigMachines they no longer keep in contact with us. Our issues are tickets that repeat (printing queue issues) and we have limited, very very very limited interaction with humans as we use to.
- BigIdeas!? No more BigIdea conferences to interact with the BMI development team, managers and service groups that service our Verizon account. Oracle dropped this off the map and inserted it into some other "Oracle" event that no longer has any meaning. Upset as a long time 5+ year customer on this issue.
We (Verizon) still use BigMachines to process large business orders of our Verizon Enterprise Solutions but ever since Oracle has purchased the product/company we have lost our 1:1 busness relationship with trying to fix/update the tool to support a Fortune 50 company. We continuously have service interuptions (reboots) needed for the Printable solutions when too many, lage quotes go to contract. We receive quarterly fixes that break items in use and Oracle does not seem to give us the "care" we received when it was just BigMachines. Also there is no longer a Big Ideas summit to meet with the support team to vet our issues/needs.
My BigMachines CPQ Review
Current Business problems:
1) Multipricebook Quotes with Salesforce opportunity, limitations in BigMachines restricts only one price book per quote we BigMachines Pricebook (very few Customers Mulitpricebook functionality), we overcome by building a custom solution in salesforce which is really time-consuming exercises for sales especially when they build quotes for Global Partners & Customers.
2) Exporting SKUs from an Excel attachment - for renewals, Service sales gets 200+ SKU in Excel. Currently, BigMachines doesn't have a standard functionality to load SKUs from an Excel sheet and create a quote.
3) WebServices Calls from external systems, BigMachines does not encourage web services calls from external systems, hence we need to bring in all operational data from other systems, stored in data tables, which is not a good practise.
4) Integration with Oracle Applications (ERP) - As Oracle acquired BigMachines, we are looking for standard ERP integration for application modules (OM, INV, TCA, etc.).
- Fast, easy access, good user interface, not much training needed for end users.
- SFDC Integration makes it easy for our sales people to complete the final Customer Quote & Proposal in one shot rather using different systems.
- Ability to support complex configuration rules for various product lines.
- Good admin features, easy customization that can be used for simple solutions as well as very advanced ones.
- Good customer support, CSA meetings, taking feedback from customers and trying to implement in future releases.
- Multicurrency and Multipricebook Quotes with SDFC
- Cannot join Data tables in a single BMQL, need to write complex loops to join 3 to 4 data tables.
- Ajax enabled options in Recommendation Rules, Recommendation Item Rules like what we have in Constraint rules (don't want full page refresh for all firing rules).
- Configuration flow (layout) can be better, although it's drag and drop from Version 12, we'd like to have better page layouts and better error messages for users (like dialog boxes).
- Dynamic Menu population for Single Select Menu & Multi Select Menu Attributes - the list of values can be dynamic by querying from a data table, right now it's all hard coded. For all new menu additions, we need to add them manually and deploy the whole configuration.
2) Item master - data integration with source systems, price change tracking, questions on data governance needs to be asked in particular
3) Customer Pricing - Understand your complex pricing rules to suit with BigMachines functionality
4) Integration with other systems (not SDFC), how to build the custom integration solutions
Understand all your business requirements and make sure whether standard BMI functionality supports them, you might end you making tons of customizations
A Powerful tool, but not for everyone
- The ability to configure complex packages and bundles with highly advanced configuration rules.
- The document engine is a powerful tool that gives great control on what the finished quote will look like
- Most recently, the Admin screen is very user-friendly and easy for a new user to pick it up and use
- Advanced coding for some areas in config and pricing engine are written in BML. This Java-like code may be a bit tricky for someone trying to write very advanced configuration rules or advanced pricing.
- The flagship system needs to have an easier way to enter in pricing. In the BMX version, pricing is handled through multiple matricies, but in the flagship it is compiled into one ugly rule.
- Customization. Other software comes with tools to help customize the "look and feel" quickly. To get a re-vamped look on the flagship product, you'll need a CSS expert.
- The administration of the product is quite easy and straightforward. You can quickly setup products and configuration formulas. It's a simple process, but you can make it advanced via the powerful administration tools.
- BigMachines Express is a Force.com native application built directly into Salesforce, creating a seamless experience for users.
- The Quoting module can help you create really professional-looking quotes and proposals.
- The software could use a more robust approval workflow system. Currently it interfaces with the Sales Price field within Salesforce which can make setting discount levels outside of the tool difficult due to Sales Price being your new List Price.
- Needs more grouping/nesting options in the Quoting module.
- Would be nice to be able to clone Configuration Rules as they can get quite complex.
My life with BigMachines
- You can configure the product very effectively. You can write the Rules to "constrain the questions", " Hide/UnHide the questions" and recommend the parts
- Approval workflow is key
- Proposal Generation is positive, which is not effective though.
- Proposal Generation is quite harder and it's time consuming.
- Too Many limitations. The basic product will work only for small sized businesses only. For a mid-size/full size business we have to do lot of customisations, which is tough.
- CSS is one of the major challenges.
- Data-tables are flat.
- The webservices APIs need improvement.
- FTP transfers need to be upgraded.
- Subversion is not available
Hard to steer, but once on autopilot, then its great
- Strong Configure Price Quote(CPQ) engine
- Flexible enough to handle any business processes you may have
- Integrates seemlessly with Salesforce to make it a much better experience with the sales users
- Can be used as a shopping cart engine as well
- Too complex at times
- Some API calls don't seem to work the same way as the UI calls
- The document engine is pretty slow
- Sometimes you need to do a lot of coding to acheive a small functionality
- Approval process is not mobile friendly
Very good industry standard CPQ solution
- Configuration engine.
- Approval workflows.
- Integration with CRM.
- Document engine.
- User interface.
- Advanced API access.
- Good CPQ product with most common business processes embedded and ready to use out of the box.
- Wide range of CRM integrations.
- Provision to accommodate custom business processes within the tool.
OK tool
- I like how the validation/hiding/constraint rules are very easy to create without coding intervention.
- The mobile approval is a nice feature to have.
- Templates are not easily modified unless it is written with CSS.
- No spell check on the document editor
BigMachines is a BigDeal!
- BigMachines makes it easy for business people or beginning developers to help configure they're own product.
- BigMachines has a great configuration element. It can handle some very complex configurations, and often handles add-ons like calls to webservices pretty well.
- BigMachines (the company) usually does a great job of helping the customer when they get stuck on an issue. In my experience, when we open a case, someone responds fairly quickly.
- DocEngine needs some serious help. It's buggy, not user friendly, and in general not very consistent. The DocX output type is especially challenging to work with.
- The Help section of BigMachines has been downright neglected it seems. The articles are very basic, and as a developer it can be very frustrating not to be able to find the answers you are looking for with more specific and advanced questions.
BigMachines, a maintenance nightmare!
- It handled heavy calculations very well, i.e. fast.
- It is possible to add any business logic to the system.
- Support and documentation are very poor. The support is bordering on unprofessional. The documentation on how to configure the system is minimal, and Googling information, returns no hits. So the cost of maintenance is high.
- It is very hard to maintain your implementation, and deployment of changes is non-trivial. So the cost of maintenance is high.
- The document engine (the rich text editor part) is so poor we turned back to the xsl markup language to deploy changes faster and have more control. The engine automagically removed variables. So the cost of maintenance is high.
- The user interface make it very hard and time consuming for users to produce quotes.
- I don’t see any other alternatives, that are based on Salesforce.com and that would support our complexity - complex order outputs, sophisticated configuration engine for complex business rules
- Sarbox compliance - our business rules are very complex and Sarbox makes it much more complicated as you need to track everything.
- It is configurable – just requires time from a system analyst
- I know it can work, but it takes a lot of time, effort and money
- We used to use their virtual administrator service, but experienced a lot of turnover and varying skill levels. We felt we were better off having someone in-house. It does however help to have expertise available from Big Machines. The VA service provides technical depth on their end.
- They have suffered from a lot of growth – both in turnover and burnout of people