Oracle CPQ - Not Recommended!
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Within the telecommunication industry, we have many products with complex configuration requirements. Oracle CPQ is very customizable and able to handle the complexity with a significant effort on our part. Management of configurations and CPQ in general is extremely lacking.
Pros
- Has the ability to handle complex configurations.
- Performance is quite good when configurators are running.
- Training videos are good, but expensive, and charged separately
Cons
- The migration center, utilized for migrating changes from Dev > Test > Prod is a disaster. It will show items recently migrated as still not being migrated. It also will delete attributes and BML scripts that are in use thus corrupting your configurators even though this is not possible within the CPQ application itself.
- Error logging needs a complete overhaul. If you have many developers creating configurations, it is difficult to impossible to tell which errors were generated by which user. It writes all errors that occur, even those that are simple typos while you are creating new configurations.
- Customer support is poor. To be told "It is what it is" or "That's just the way it works" are unacceptable responses to defects within the tool. They will only work via there ticket system which means an issue that could be solved in an hour on the phone takes days over the ticketing system.
- Maintenance is high. You will require developers with coding experience to handle BML coding and complex integrations. Or you may require hiring implementation specialists, adding to the already premium cost you are paying.
- Management of new releases is costly to maintenance. You will be forced to get a new release every quarter. During this two week window, you will not be able to migrate changes to your production environment. THIS IS 8 WEEKS OF DOWNTIME PER YEAR! This is very disruptive to our business.
Return on Investment
- It does make producing quotes more efficient.
- It is very difficult and time consuming to manage if you will have many configurators.
Usability
Other Software Used
Salesforce Commerce Cloud
