Oracle CPQ vs. Oracle Siebel CRM

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.

Incentivized

Throughout the time that we have used it, Oracle has provided a full on pipeline of solutions and account planning which increases the services of marketing, accounting and finance. We notice that with sales it was simply a breakthrough, allowing us to make better decisions with real-time view and proactive communication to get the job done. No dislikes for this software at all

• 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.

Incentivized

• Siebel clearly separates the data layer, from the business layer, application, and web.
• The navigation and relationship between entities is clear and easy to configure, but it can be improved.
• Siebel CRM as a product is robust, reliable, and easy to configure. The architecture is solid and scalable.
• Components can be added on demand.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Lack of documentation for developers -- it feels like almost nothing in the grand scheme of things, especially around OpenUI. Sure there are some things on bookshelf, but that's all it is, some. It's not in depth--there are hardly any examples and I generally get answers outside of bookshelf.
• Support isn't so good, I'd sooner try to solve the problem with many workarounds than put a support ticket in that might go into the abyss and never get resolved.
• The user interface is lacking for our version. Granted, we are at least four years behind and have no mobile responsiveness (we had to build that ourselves) but I've seen the newer version and there need to be more intuitive user interface patterns in general
• Sometimes there are weird quirks in customizations that should work in theory, but don't.

Incentivized

So far it is all good with BigMachines, looking for new features since Oracle acquisition has created a lot of expectations. We have outlined our limitations (out of box functionality) in our periodic customer successor advice meetings for a while, hope we get a resolution soon. Also, the BigMachines user license fee has increased a lot in the last three years.

Incentivized

While they have a decent administrator interface (relative to other apps), the part that is unintuitive is the printer friendly output. I view this is as the meat and potatoes. They are very constrained on these abilities. To make a font change is really cumbersome. There is no content management protocol to protocol. This kills us.

Oracle Siebel CRM is an older Sales CRM, so many of it's features aren't as current as ones used today. However, it has a smoother and easy-to-use UI. We're glad that we can still access Oracle Siebel CRM because it's easier to find older information that we can't easily find in our Salesforce Lightning CRM tool.

Incentivized

Other than one day two years ago and an hour or two a few times since then due to data center outages, it has been very reliable

It depends upon the day however there are so many failure points with online services, including our internet service, that this is probably closer to 9 with the latest version

Some specific support personal was good and fixed some problems fast using proper solutions. But when one of them went to sleep when we had critical issues and they do unreported commits to our production environment which caused issues and they were hiding it?? you can not give more than a two (maybe even that is too much). They also failed to add a feature for us which also bring the grade down.

We no longer have support for our Oracle Siebel CRM. When we did, the support was slow to get some things fixed, therefore, there was a lot of downtime. Of course, this slowed down our overall productivity and increased our overall frustration with the tool. However, it would be nice if we still had some support with it since we still do access it from time to time.

Incentivized

They have pretty good training. Our business analysts have been able to go to entry and advanced level training. They have a train the trainer model. Our business analyst attended training, then trained the rest of our staff.

Like with any implementation go into it with a clear and realistic plan for getting the implementation completed and it will go much smoother. BigMachines has a clear process and an excellent staff fort getting an implementation completed we just needed to follow more of it instead of creating our own roadblocks

We debated a few different options, including a home-grown custom program, uCommerce, and just using only Oracle Commerce Cloud. Since we had already decided to use Oracle Commerce Cloud over uCommerce, the integrations available between OCC, Oracle's ERP system, and Oracle CPQ definitely seemed like the easiest option with the greatest benefits. However, the cost/benefit of Oracle CPQ was more apparent when we were ready to launch more complex configurations across all of our product groups.

Incentivized

Siebel is quite a bit slower in performance and lacks support for modern browsers, in contrast to Salesforce.com. It's also much less searchable and discoverable (with regard to insights) and lacks a fresh look. I'm not privy to all the reasons why our organization moved away from Siebel CRM, but I'm glad we did.

Incentivized

• Sales Operations or IT would have a better understanding of the license user costs and ROI. I do know that Sales has experienced frustrations in the the lead gen-to-close process and have experienced delays with some deals. In other instances, the software has worked fine. I would love to see an analysis on how our lead-conversion rate, sales cycles, and proposal volume stacks up.

Incentivized

• Very positive impact: replacing multiple silo applications based on outdated technology
• Provide data integrity by eliminating redundancy and the use of audit trails
• Improves safety of users on the field: use of tracking tool and providing list of hazards
• Thanks to the multi-org feature of the Siebel CRM, after a first successful implementation we were able to package the solution and offer it to multiple other customers, with minimum changes.

Incentivized