Using Configuration for Building Complex Engineering Bill of Materials (BOMs)
August 22, 2016
Using Configuration for Building Complex Engineering Bill of Materials (BOMs)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Apttus Configure Price Quote
Apttus CPQ is being used by our customer and engineering organization to configure custom products. The CPQ accelerates the time to generate the bill of material. It is an engineering process that used to take days or even weeks, but with CPQ, it takes only minutes.
- Ability to manage large quantities of validation rules necessary for complex product builds.
- No product addresses a company's requirement right out of the box, but Apttus CPQ is built on the Salesforce.com platform which is a distinct advantage for us. It allows us to build functional extensions, and customize the application to our specific usage.
- Service and support is the key for any product, and Apttus has always made efforts to support their products with continual improvements.
- The GUI design of Apttus is configurable but prescriptive. If you want a very specific look and feel, it will take some effort to do so. There have been some modern design updates recently using AngularJS. Check it out to see if it works for you.
- The ability to generate engineered configurations that is right by construction has reduced the cycle time of the customer engagement. The fact that we are able to guide the process and end up with a validated bill of material reduces the iterations with the customers.
- As long as the validations rules are correct the generated bill of material is accurate. We are now looking at using Apttus to perform quality checks in our product rules since the tool is able to test different configurations quickly and efficiently.
- Configuration that use to take weeks and consumed valuable engineering resources has been transformed to become a customer facing application that is simple enough for customer to self-service.
At the time of selection, we assessed other configuration tools to include Selectica and Big Machine. We decided on Apttus because of it configuration flexibility and the fact that it was built on the Salesforce.com platform. That allowed us to configure and customize for our specific use case. It also gave us other capabilities such as integration to the CRM and ability to generate reports and dashboards.