Business change can turn your old ERP into a roadblock for many reasons: growth, acquisitions, product development changes, or the addition of new sales channels, for example. The challenge can become a crisis when system deficiencies hamper your ability to capture and price customer orders. That can hurt customer satisfaction, slow growth, and impact your organization’s future.
Making large-scale changes to or replacing your company’s legacy ERP system—typically the transactional backbone of the enterprise—to solve these problems may not be wise (or a prudent career move). Fortunately, there’s a more practical path. Leveraging a cloud-based application can address these issues without ERP changes.
A recent example shows how it can work
Consider this real example of a rapidly-growing, high-tech firm with a complex and frequently-changing product catalog. Their complicated deal cycles required a collaborative approach to developing customer quotes. Each quote needed numerous revisions, all of which were dependent on involvement from diverse stakeholders, including sales operations, sales engineers, account managers and third-party suppliers. The process relied on an old configurator in their legacy ERP and a patchwork of tools, manual steps, and email communications.
The result? The foundational, recurring task of quoting took extensive manual effort, caused delays that kept customers waiting, and required constant retraining of sales teams. Plus, rolling out new products was hindered by the arduous process of modeling new product definitions in the legacy ERP system. Quote accuracy suffered, often referencing obsolete products and requiring manual checks and in-depth troubleshooting. The resulting delays caused customer satisfaction to drop, too.
They needed a change to enable better sales processes, accelerate the introduction of new products, and reduce order-entry errors in their legacy ERP. The solution was to replace the configurator in their legacy ERP. The customer chose Oracle Fusion Cloud Configure Price Quote (CPQ)—part of Oracle Fusion Cloud CX.
Show me the money
Today, Oracle CPQ provides their sales teams with a guided selling experience that reduces the learning curve for new and complex products while facilitating cross selling and upselling. Collaboration around customer quotes no longer depends on email and ad hoc spreadsheets. Instead, it is centralized in Oracle CPQ, ensuring that every quote gets the timely attention it deserves. Oracle CPQ is integrated with their CRM applications, which helps with pipeline reporting to sales management, who benefit from real-time visibility. Our rapidly growing high-tech customer saw major benefits, including:
- 700% reduction in effort to define configuration rules: Previously two or more weeks were required to model product changes. Now it takes less than a day. The introduction of new products goes faster and requires less administrative overhead—a major step forward in a high-velocity product business.
- 90% drop in the time needed to build baseline configurations: Previously users had to select up to 50 parameters to generate a basic product configuration. Today many product parameters are automatically defaulted, allowing users to generate a baseline configuration in as few as five steps.
- Growth in high-margin, specialty product sales: Oracle CPQ allows sales teams to more easily identify the correct solutions to meet customer needs. Orders with simple configurations are automatically processed as routine. But when configurations need in-depth technical expertise, automated workflows can now involve engineering teams. This means that engineer-to-order products and custom products flow as smoothly as orders for standard products. The company has seen growth in high-margin, specialty sales as a result.
- Better proposals and an improved customer experience: The previous ERP-based solution was limited to outputting a simple bill of materials list—hardly suitable in a sales context. But using Oracle CQP, the customer can generate a comprehensive set of proposal documents with just one click, including multi-language proposals. They include consistent pricing, terms and conditions, formatting, branding, and can include product documentation if required.
- Better order management: Orders that flow from Oracle CPQ are accurate, rarely requiring manual investigation or administrative intervention. This allows the ERP team to focus on optimizing back-end processes that keep the company running efficiently like order management, manufacturing, fulfillment, supplier development, and receivables.
Oracle CPQ punches above its weight
On first pass, Oracle CPQ may seem like a diminutive application with a narrow scope, but it delivers massive benefits. You can streamline sales, boost revenue, maximize margins, and more. And the list of knock-on benefits is exhaustive. Perhaps most importantly, it frees sales teams to go into the field, get in front of customers, and close deals faster.
Oracle CPQ is used by over 600 well-known brand names (including Oracle itself) and by more than 600,000 employees. Use the button to learn more about what it can do for your business.
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