CPQ Online Help

The latest release of CPQ includes several updates and enhancements, including:

While CPQ can automate most transactions, there are always some deals that need collaborative wisdom to push them through. Sometimes web users, partners, and sales people need re-assurance that they are selecting the most appropriate product or the most appropriate options. Other times, more experienced sales people can assist their colleagues when it comes to making up-sell or cross-sell choices. We added social media like collaboration capabilities to ensure these types of transactions are pushed through the sales process. These collaboration capabilities will ensure that transactions don’t stall or don’t become abandoned.

Click here to see the demo about this feature.
Please contact Webcom support for assistance in setting up collaboration process through CPQ.

In v8 we have introduced attribute containers. Containers are ideal for repetitive configurations, such as selling insurance plan to a family where same or similar questions are answered for each family member; or selling software modules where a same or similar questions are answer for each module, or selling multi-publication advertising, or selling server racks. With V9 we are able to control who can see which container column. Also, with V9 you can easily include container’s content into your proposals or other generated documents.

In addition to our powerful and extremely flexible rule engine, now you have the ability to execute rules and populate attributes based on data found in tables. Administrators will not have to write rules in many cases as they can simply be inferred from tables.
Setting up hierarchical drop down search is explained at Step 3: Product Attribute Details Step

Just like generated documents can either be in their native format (MS Word, Excel) or in PDF, the dynamically created notifications attachments can now be in PDF as well.
Parameter that gets notifications to be generated in PDF is found at Application Parameters

In v9 you are able to automatically set up quote expiration behavior. For example when a quote expires, it can automatically be pushed to another status, notification could be sent to sales team, partners, customers, and CRM opportunity may be updated automatically as well.
In order to see how to set up automatic quote expiration, please go to Auto Quote Expiration

New tags have been introduced that make product maintenance easier by enabling database driven rules execution.

Users are able to add products through bulk validation into existing quote.
How to set it up : No action is required from CPQ admin in order to allow users to run bulk validation into existing quotes. Users will be presented with 2 options - 'Create New Quote' and 'Add To Current Quote' when system produces bulk validation results.
To see how bulk validation can be used, please go to Bulk Validation

One of CPQ's great features is that quotes can be approved via PDAs without requiring approvers to log into the applications. This is ideal for busy traveling executives. But sometimes those approval requests slip through the cracks. Now, if there has been no response to approval requests, salesman can trigger ‘Approval Reminder’ process. CPQ will find all approvers that have not yet taken any actions (approve/reject) on the quote and send them reminders.
To see how to set up approval reminders, please go to Approval Reminder Action

v9 brings more flexibility when defining margin health boundaries - values can be calculated or pulled from tables based on different parameters such as product, product type, user profile etc.
To see how to set up dynamic margin health boundaries, please go to Margin Health Indicators

Introduced ability for admin to receive Emails that contain PDA links. Admin can resend lost approval requests, Emails that have been marked as junk etc.
You can define whether admin will receive PDA links on Application Parameters

CPQ could always control which fields in each quote tab are accessible (read, write, hidden) by which users. Now, you're also be able to control which tabs are visible based on user group.
To see how to set up quote tabs permissions, please go to Quote Tab Permissions

V9 allows you to correctly compute gross margins and work with margin health indicators and sliders even if you elect to use rolled up pricing instead of individually pricing each item in a quote or shopping cart.
To see how rolled up cost and margin can be used, please go to Rolled-up cost and margin

Product collections are used when configuration results in many independent items being added to a quote (shopping cart) simultaneously. With V9, performance of collections has been significantly improved.

Our permissions rules engine has virtually no limits when it comes to controlling who can see which quote or who can see which customer. The price for this flexibility is that sometimes it took up to 5 seconds to return back the list of all quotes or customers a user can see when evaluating thousands of quotes and customers. We have optimized our algorithm to eliminate unnecessary delays significantly speeding these operations up regardless of how complex permission rules are.

New users can be notified via Email about their log-in data when added to CPQ.
To see how you can change this parameter and control content of the Email send to new users, please go to Application Parameters and look for parameter 'Do not email login details to users created by admin'