Turnkey Quote with Equipment, Service, Contract & Lease
Requirement: Siebel needs to support Promotions, Buying Groups, negotiated discounts, extended service contracts, third party products and services, lease and allow the sales rep to provide a turnkey quote to their customers.
Problem: This was a fairly complex solution and almost none of the functionality is supported in Siebel. Promotions were not automatic unless they had been pre-negotiated. Customers could belong to multiple buying groups. Almost all contracts were with the buying groups unless they were preferred customers and had additional contracts. The contracts itself could cross over product lines and the discounts offered were different. While best price was the goal, discounts, available promotions and entitlements all had a role in determining value for the customer. All quotes for equipment, service, contracts, promotions, orders and lease were separate applications or only available as spreadsheets with complex calculations. Getting all the functionality into a single application and insulating the user from the complexity required a entirely new approach and design.
Solution: We spent a lot of time just designing the user interface and building and refining mockups until we came up with a intuitive, simple way that the user was going to interact with the system. We leveraged and used some of the existing Siebel functionality where possible and most was build on top. The quoting process was well received by the users and had a almost 100% satisfaction. The time to provide a Quote with equipment pricing, extended services, entitlements and lease went from 2-3 days and a lot of communication via phone calls and emails to about 10-15 minutes. The Quote output doubled within 6 months of a staggered release. It is probably my favorite and most complex and satisfying project I have ever had the honor of working on. We had a small team of extremely smart, dedicated and committed individuals with a lot of creative energy and we worked well as a team. I would take this team on just about any project if I had a choice.