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Configuring Assets
Quote-to-Cash is the end to end business process between your customer's interest in a purchase and the revenue that your business realizes from that purchase.
The Quote-to-Cash flow includes creating a Sales Quote, submitting the quote, negotiating and managing the contract, fulfilling the order, tracking payment, and managing your customers’ purchases.
In the Quote-to-Cash flow, Asset Management is a set of mission-critical business processes that you can employ to manage your customer's purchased products with a variety of billing models to ensure efficient collections and accounting.
The following table lists and describes industry challenges with Asset Management and the solutions that Conga provides for each challenge.
| Challenges with Asset Management | Conga-provided solutions |
|---|---|
Asset Management can be a complex coordination of activities including custom design and configuration. Depending on your business requirements it could be,
If customers update their orders, fulfillment becomes even harder to manage. | Asset Management is based on the order information that you have already defined in your sales quote and resulting contracts. Asset Management then, becomes very easy when you integrate Conga CPQ with Conga CLM. Historically, Assets have been managed using an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application. Because it is important for you to capture on-the-fly changes to orders and integrate your Order Management processes with customer facing applications like Contract Management solutions, assets or purchased products are now also managed within a CRM system, or in multi-functional CPQ applications. |
| If a customer has multiple orders or changes, invoices must be coordinated so your customers do not receive multiple invoices. | Renewals, changes, swaps, terminations, and additions to an asset increase the complexity of invoices. You can use Asset Management to generate an accurate, up to date, and easy to understand invoice so your customers understand it easily, pay quickly, and have a positive experience. |
Your finance team must analyze transaction and revenue information to device the best revenue schedules that determine when revenue is recognized. Revenue recognition depends on when your customers receive their products, services and subscriptions. | Revenue recognition can be a challenge, but it’s much easier when Finance can automatically generate the appropriate revenue schedules for products, services, and subscriptions based on contracts. With CPQ, you can verify if services are rendered or products delivered, and then see how those impact your customers' billing schedules and the overall revenue forecast. |
You can define the Asset Management functions with different data objects to track Quote and Contract details until an order is fulfilled. With Asset Management you can
- make it easy for customers to add more products and services
- align all product changes to your customer’s bill cycle
- drive charge pro-rations and pro-ration credits
- customize the renewal process that best suits your organizational needs
The following table lists the benefits Conga Asset Management has over ERPs.
| Challenges with ERPs | Solutions by Asset Management |
|---|---|
| Do not understand recurring revenues or distinguish between monthly recurring revenues and annual recurring revenues. | Works with accounting solutions and meet the financial requirements unique to both one-time purchases and subscription businesses. |
| Do not handle pricing and packaging changes like upgrades, downgrades or increments. | Can quickly modify your pricing and packaging options irrespective of the number you increment or decrement. |
| Do not tell you how many active customers you have, or your rate of customer retention. | The reporting feature can detail your renewal rates and help you up-sell, cross-sell, and formulate strategies to increase customer retention. |
| Do not give you a unified view of how your business is doing. | Works seamlessly with CPQ, CLM, and Billing Management to bring awareness of information including renewal plans and usage statistics to every department in your organization. |
Whether it is a one-time order, a subscription, or a usage-based service you sell to your customers, you can use Asset Management to manage any purchased product or service for your customers.
Asset-Based Ordering functionality is now built into CPQ. With the Asset-Based Ordering functionality, you can service and manage existing orders based on your customers' requirements.
With ABO, you can perform transactions for Purchased Products using cloud-enabled systems that operate on a massive scale and real-time speed. With Asset-Based Ordering, you can perform complex functions such as suspensions, mid-cycle upgrades, downgrades, add-ons, and cancellations, all on a single, user-friendly interface.
With Asset-Based Ordering you can
- work seamlessly with CRMs to bring subscription awareness to your front office
- unify your commerce, billing, and finance processes so customer relationships take center stage
- increase recurring revenue that you earn from existing customers by retaining them with renewals, incentives, rebates, and promotions
Asset-based Ordering adds to the robust CPQ functionality and the larger Quote-to-Cash experience by giving you a quick return on your investment and quickly increasing both, revenue and customer base.