Item: Oracle CPQ
Rating: 9
Author: Jim Kiltie

Pros and Cons

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.

Return on Investment

BigMachines has provided us with a configuration tool that is scalable, accessible and useable by our international sales staff, and through the configuration rules, has increased the accuracy of the quotes being generated for a very complex product.
BigMachines has allowed us to integrate CPQ with our CRM tool (Salesforce.com), thus putting more information at the fingertips of our executive team.
BigMachines has allowed us to put more structure and control around our product pricing.

Likelihood to Recommend

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

Users and Roles

90 - BigMachines is used by our Sales, Pre-Sales, Sales Operations, Supply Chain, Customer Support, Finance and Manufacturing teams.

2 - Our support team consists of one Sales Operations person whose responsibility is staying current on any new or updated rule or product changes, and an IT Business Analyst who is the system administrator. BigMachines continually moves towards making the administration simple enough that a non-IT person could administer it, and I have run across other companies who have non-IT people as their sys admins. There is a lot of scripting involved, though, so a programming or analytical background is definitely helpful. BigMachines support also requires exceptional organizational skill.

Business Processes Supported

Prior to BigMachines we were using an Excel configurator. That configurator worked well for people physically on our network, but our international sales users were basically unable to use that tool due to performance issues. With BigMachines being a cloud app, it is now available to our world-wide sales organization with similar performance for all.
Our configurations are very complex and we were having issues with getting valid configurations from Sales to Manufacturing. With the implementation of BigMachines, we are now able to set precise rules leading to the generation of accurate configurations.
Our previous configurator did not provide locked-down controls over cost, pricing and product code generation. BigMachines has allowed us to build a CPQ tool with the controls required to meet Sarbannes-Oxley compliance.

Innovative Uses

We previously struggled with the generation of upgrade quotes. BigMachines has allowed us to greatly simplify this process by using quotes previously created in BigMachines, and comparing them to full configuration upgrade quotes to provide a quote of the differences.
With the integration between BigMachines and Salesforce.com, we are now able to get more sales and forecasting data into the hands of the analysts within our company, and in reports and dashboards that they are already familiar with.
We are now able to do some calculations within the configurator for estimated system performance and bandwidth to provide real-time feedback to our sales staff. In the past, this would have required additional communication from our product or benchmarking teams, resulting in a delay in generating quotes.

Future Planned Uses

We have plans to implement our service renewals as a configurable product within BigMachines.
We have plans to integrate BigMachines with our Agile/JDE ERP systems to eliminate manual processes.

Likelihood to Renew

Our company was initially skeptical about whether any tool would be able to handle our complex configurations and pricing. We have been pleasantly surprised with the capability of BigMachines and its ability to handle what we throw at it. We are so sold on BigMachines that we have plans to integrate BigMachines with our ERP platform in 2014, thus embedding it further in our suite of enterprise tools.

Implementation Rating

See my product review for requirements for a successful implementation.

Implementation Details / Implementation Partner

Vendor implemented
Professional services company

BigMachines' Professional Services group did our initial implementation. One of the members of that team then split off from BigMachines to form his own consulting company, CirrusCPQ. We are still engaged with CirrusCPQ.

Implementation Phases

Yes - Phase I: Implement configuration and pricing rules for current products
Phase II: Implement advanced pricing and currency
Phase III: Implement upgrades and renewals
Phase IV: Integrate with ERP

Change Management Lessons

Change management was a major issue with the implementation - Our configuration rules were changing faster than our implementation was moving. This ultimately led to me getting Yellow and Blue Belt certified so I was able to make the rule changes as they came in, taking over that piece from the BigMachines implementation team. Keeping organized with the changes was (and still is) a big issue, which pushed me to building a change management process within SharePoint where I could track all the rule changes, internal feature requests and release dates/contents.

Implementation Issues

We spent 6 months implementing pricing alone. This was due to internal problems coming to an agreement on how to implement pricing, though, versus any issue with BigMachines or the implementation team. It is highly recommended to get this figured out prior to the start of implementation.
Our product was developing/maturing at the same time we were implementing, which meant a ton of rule changes were needed from how the rules had been captured by the implementation team.
Lack of active executive sponsorship to push for user adoption.

The best CPQ tool on the market!

Overall Satisfaction with Oracle CX Sales (formerly Oracle Engagement Cloud and Oracle Sales Cloud)