New Features

The following features are new to CPQ in this release.

Service CPQ

Service CPQ comprises of Installed Products (Purchased Products - Assets), Service Catalog (Quoting), Service Configuration (Config), and Service Cart modules for the service management.
Service CPQ allows customers to tackle service flows for existing or newly purchased products from Apttus. With Service CPQ, customers can define and associate services to products so their sales teams can easily find applicable services and add them to their quotes. Starting from Assets, sales teams will utilize an intuitive and familiar flow, going through a catalog of services, configuring those services, and pricing them in their cart. This functionality also provides visibility into the related equipments that are associated with the service in the cart and relationship between equipments and service assets.

Assets Enhancements

UI Enhancements for the Installed Products page

  • The Search (Filter by) panel on the Installed products now supports a number of fields that are configured in the Search Filter Fields of the Installed Product Settings. Commonly used fields in the Search panel are Start Date, End Date, Lead Time Expiration, Asset Status, and more. You can also hide or display the entire Search panel by using an arrow between the Search panel and main display panel. This is supported by AssetGrid UI only.
  • With Defer Pricing selected in Config System Properties, when you perform any ABO actions, a message is displayed on the cart page to reprice the cart before finalization.
  • Pagination is supported to let you navigate to any page dynamically when your account contains a large number of assets.
  • The Swap and Renew buttons are disabled for the superseded asset line items. CPQ checks for the Status field of related asset line items and disables these buttons for an asset line item on the Installed Products page. This change can be caused using Change> Config action for assets.

This functionality is implemented to prevent a sales rep from using the superseded asset line items in the renewed opportunities and Quote/Proposals

  • A new tab called Related Purchases is available to display all the services related to an asset. Select one or more assets and click Relate button to see the related purchases. This is supported by AssetGrid UI only.

Flow-based ABO Actions

Depending on your business units and type of purchase, the sales administrator can hide action buttons on the Installed Products page. The ability to hide the action buttons is available with the flow settings defined for a Quote/Proposal. This functionality of hiding action button at the asset line item level as stated in Installed Product Settings and at the global level.

Ability to display assets based on Account fields

For an account, you can now filter the assets to be displayed on the Installed Products page based on the Ship To or Sold To or Bill To fields. By default, all the assets filtered with the Sold To field are displayed. You can choose to filter the assets by selected account = Ship To or selected account = Bill To or selected account = Sold To using a new custom setting named Asset Source. You must specify the API name of the Account field that you want to use as a source for displaying assets. For example, to filter the assets based on Ship To field, enter Apttus_Config2ShipToAccountIdc. This is useful when an account has different locations for shipping and billing and you want to display only those assets that have been shipped to a certain location.

Quoting Enhancements

Admin Setup for Cart Views

CPQ provides System Administrator (Admin) view that allows an admin to perform the following tasks efficiently:

  • You can create a Cart View as the admin and also set it as default. This helps you configure a tailor-made cart experience for the individual group of users.
  • You can hide, edit, and delete the cart views that you created. You can also configure the cart views based on users, user profiles, and user roles.
  • In addition, you can sort the cart views with the help of Group By and Flow fields.
  • You can change the layout of the cart view.

Configuration Enhancements

Display pricing information for options included as free options within bundle

On the configuration and cart pages, you can observe the See Price in Cart link for the option product. When you click on that link, you notice that for the free item Included with bundle text is displayed as a price value.
For example, suppose you have a bundle product - laptop for a price $ 1000 and it contains an option product - Keyboard of a price $ 100. The bundle product also contains the hardware component price of $ 200 for a processor. However, CPQ displays the total price of bundle product with a keyboard like $ 1100 and the price of a processor is included as a free option within the bundle.

Criteria-Based Recommendation and Replacement Rules on the Server side

CPQ provides Recommendation and Replacement rules that are based on the condition criteria by using fields from following objects:

  • Line Item
  • Product
  • Configuration
  • Option
  • Product Attribute Value

The condition criteria contain a filter expression with operators and values.

Hide excluded options at rule or product level

You can hide the disabled options at an individual product level in addition to the global level wherein it is applied to all products. You can hide the product options that are excluded by using the Exclusion type constraint rule.
Suppose you have a product, Bundled ABC Software and Hardware with the following options:

  • 24x7 Same Day Onsite Response
  • 24x7 Support for Sev 1
  • Proactive Support Services
  • Remote Account Manager

Then you can select option 1 and disable options 2 to 4. You have the flexibility to hide disabled options at the Product level. This enables you to use the product configuration for the targeted product.

New Admin UI Enhancements

Price Dimension from Formula fields and Custom Formula

In the Pricing tab, for a Price Dimension record, you have the ability to choose the Context Type as a Formula Field or create a new custom formula. Depending on the selection, the formula field and other fields are populated to either choose a formula field or create a new formula using an expression builder.

Manage Option Groups menu in the Catalog tab

In the Catalog tab, for managing the product option groups, you have the ability to see Option Groups in a list view, similar to Category view.
For example, you can view only the option groups but not the root categories in the list view. However, when a category belong to both the types, Offering and Option Groups, then both the types are displayed in Category view as well as in Option Groups view.

Pricing Enhancements

Bucket Adjustments

You can group the adjustments in buckets. Adjustments in the same buckets are applied to the same starting price and the results from the running total price points. With bucket adjustments, you support cascading pricing discounts by controlling whether you want to apply the discounts on the previous or starting price of the Line Item. The adjustments that fall under the first bucket are applied to the starting price. Subsequent adjustments under the same buckets are applied to the previous total price.

UoM Setup and Conversion

Unit of measure (UoM) is a way to quantify resources. It is a key factor in pricing and discounting the products on the cart. With the new object called Frequency/UOM conversion rate, you can define a set of unit of measures for your product families. Products under the same family can be priced differently, based on its unit of measure. Depending on the available unit of measures for the product family, sales reps can define different discounts for different UoMs for the same product.

Discount Lock at Line Item level

You can prevent manual and group adjustments to be applied to the line items on the cart. CPQ provides the capability to lock a line item record to achieve this functionality using an existing Line Item field called Allocate Group Adjustments. Apart from the Pricing Administrator, a Sales Representative can set Allocate Group Adjustment to false at the line item level in the cart. Any group adjustments applied at the bundle or summary group level are not applied to the locked items.