Turnkey Quote with Equipment, Service, Contract and Lease
Product Configuration Rule Builder
Complex Service Pricing
Pricing and Configuration changes in Siebel and Fullfillment in SAP
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.
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.
Requirement: Currently Product releases requires 2 IT and 2 QA resources for product build and test. The business wants to own and control these product releases. Siebel provides a product UI and configuration rule engine to allow non-IT business users to create the business rules.
Problem: After some analysis the conclusion was that while it was possible to build all these rules and the UI it was time consuming and would require about two resources working full time to build and maintain these products in Siebel. It took about 3-5 man days to build and unit test the products.
Solution: After exploring alternative ways that this could be done in Siebel, the conclusion was to leverage the Siebel Product Configurator but to build a rule builder that allowed the business to enter the business rules and have the application translate and create configuration rules. This involved creation of User Interface templates with preset defaults which were then used for building the UI, taking out a repetitive task and automating it. Similarly the Rule builder guided the users to define the rules in a natural language form. These rules were global and based on conditions and could apply to all or specific products. When a product structure was ready to be build the user would click a button and all the User interface elements and applicable rules were applied and configuration rules automatically generated. This will drastically reduce the amount of time it takes to build and test products. The rule engine supports 19 different business rules. The rule engine is flexible and can be extended for new kinds of rules. The rule engine supported both product selection based rules as well as rules based on quote data. The only ongoing maintenance was to enter master data for any new products which could be done as part of the product creation process.
Problem: After some analysis the conclusion was that while it was possible to build all these rules and the UI it was time consuming and would require about two resources working full time to build and maintain these products in Siebel. It took about 3-5 man days to build and unit test the products.
Solution: After exploring alternative ways that this could be done in Siebel, the conclusion was to leverage the Siebel Product Configurator but to build a rule builder that allowed the business to enter the business rules and have the application translate and create configuration rules. This involved creation of User Interface templates with preset defaults which were then used for building the UI, taking out a repetitive task and automating it. Similarly the Rule builder guided the users to define the rules in a natural language form. These rules were global and based on conditions and could apply to all or specific products. When a product structure was ready to be build the user would click a button and all the User interface elements and applicable rules were applied and configuration rules automatically generated. This will drastically reduce the amount of time it takes to build and test products. The rule engine supports 19 different business rules. The rule engine is flexible and can be extended for new kinds of rules. The rule engine supported both product selection based rules as well as rules based on quote data. The only ongoing maintenance was to enter master data for any new products which could be done as part of the product creation process.
Requirement: Harmonize the extended service offerings from 7 different product lines using 4 different applications and integrate them all in Siebel in order for sales reps to be able to offer a extended warranty in the same quote as equipment and improve turnaround time. It took anywhere from half a day to two days depending on the complexity of the configuration to get a quote from the service specialists.
Problem: While the entitlements and service plans could be harmonized there was no general agreement that could be reached on pricing methods. Due to an industry precedence or because of the perceived need that they would be hamstrung in being able to react to market conditions or competitor offerings we had to implement all the various pricing methods. Siebel does not support complex service pricing and the entire effort was custom build.
Solution: The pricing methods supported fixed component pricing, uplifts based on equipment offering or base service price, with volume discounts for certain elements with common functionality. For uplifts there was flexibility to control the various percentages based on characteristics of items being covered such as hardware, hardware/software or just software components. Service options also be be priced as fixed, uplifts based on configuration, service plan or service configuration base price. These various pricing methods could be mixed and matched on the same quotes with various service offerings. In order to overcome lack of service product knowledge there were defaults and required options that were automatically added to the quote to prevent errors. These rules just required to be maintained as master data by the service department and the application took care of the making sure that the service offering was valid.
Problem: While the entitlements and service plans could be harmonized there was no general agreement that could be reached on pricing methods. Due to an industry precedence or because of the perceived need that they would be hamstrung in being able to react to market conditions or competitor offerings we had to implement all the various pricing methods. Siebel does not support complex service pricing and the entire effort was custom build.
Solution: The pricing methods supported fixed component pricing, uplifts based on equipment offering or base service price, with volume discounts for certain elements with common functionality. For uplifts there was flexibility to control the various percentages based on characteristics of items being covered such as hardware, hardware/software or just software components. Service options also be be priced as fixed, uplifts based on configuration, service plan or service configuration base price. These various pricing methods could be mixed and matched on the same quotes with various service offerings. In order to overcome lack of service product knowledge there were defaults and required options that were automatically added to the quote to prevent errors. These rules just required to be maintained as master data by the service department and the application took care of the making sure that the service offering was valid.
Requirement: Siebel was going to be the pricing and configuration master and SAP be the master for orders and fulfillment.
Problem: There were a lot of order changes that happened at various times between the sale and installation of some of the products. Also there were pre-installation items that happened to ship at different times. This required us to allow parts of the configuration to be locked while other parts of the configuration required to be open for changes. To further complicate the process some of the orders were aged simply because of the type of product and/or when the customer had the site ready for installation. Sometimes these products could not be delivered as configured and change orders became necessary.
Solution: The status for SAP material lines were maintained in Siebel and customization were made to the configurator such that if Items had status such that they could not be changed every product/ sub-product under would be read only and prevent changes.
All change orders had a snapshot saved. Before sending a change order to SAP a match process was performed with the previous snapshot to find all the changes. If a change order need to be performed because of upgrade that needed to be done, then an custom auto match would be performed on order lines and replacement order lines that changed would be send back to SAP. A rollback process also allowed the order to go back to a previous state.
Problem: There were a lot of order changes that happened at various times between the sale and installation of some of the products. Also there were pre-installation items that happened to ship at different times. This required us to allow parts of the configuration to be locked while other parts of the configuration required to be open for changes. To further complicate the process some of the orders were aged simply because of the type of product and/or when the customer had the site ready for installation. Sometimes these products could not be delivered as configured and change orders became necessary.
Solution: The status for SAP material lines were maintained in Siebel and customization were made to the configurator such that if Items had status such that they could not be changed every product/ sub-product under would be read only and prevent changes.
All change orders had a snapshot saved. Before sending a change order to SAP a match process was performed with the previous snapshot to find all the changes. If a change order need to be performed because of upgrade that needed to be done, then an custom auto match would be performed on order lines and replacement order lines that changed would be send back to SAP. A rollback process also allowed the order to go back to a previous state.