Revenue Cloud: Part 4 – Product Configurator (Configure, Price, Quote – CPQ)

Author: Anuj Vaishampayan

Revenue Cloud (formerly Revenue Lifecycle Management or RLM) is the latest and greatest Configure Price Quote (CPQ) solution from Salesforce. In this blog post series, we will deep dive into Revenue Cloud and compare features to the capabilities of Industries CPQ and Industries OM.

Start with our earlier posts before jumping into this post. See all the posts in this series below:

• Revenue Cloud Part 1 - Introduction
• Revenue Cloud Part 2 - Product Catalog Management (PCM)
• Revenue Cloud Part 3 - Salesforce Pricing
• Revenue Cloud Part 4 - Product Configurator (Configure, Price, Quote – CPQ)
• Revenue Cloud Part 5 - Dynamic Revenue Orchestrator (DRO)
• Revenue Cloud Part 6 - Salesforce Contracts
• Revenue Cloud Part 7 - Summary & Closing Thoughts
• Revenue Cloud Part 8 - Revenue Cloud Performance

Product Configurator (Configure, Price, Quote – CPQ)

Salesforce Product Configurator: simplifying complex product offerings.

The Salesforce Product Configurator is an advanced tool designed to streamline the process of presenting and configuring complex product offerings. It provides an intuitive interface that simplifies the selection of the most suitable combination of features for a product, making it easier for sales representatives to configure product bundles and customize individual product attributes.

Efficient Configuration Management

With the Product Configurator, your sales representatives can validate product selections instantly and receive real-time pricing updates, enhancing accuracy and saving time and resources. This tool is valuable for businesses offering complex products, significantly improving the customer experience.

Intelligent Configuration

The Product Configurator offers an intuitive configuration experience with dynamic rules, instant pricing, headless APIs, and AI integration to boost sales productivity.

Salesforce Platform Integration

Built on the Salesforce platform, the Product Configurator provides extensibility in custom fields, context mapping, UI templates, configuration rules, and pricing procedures to meet versatile business needs.

High-Performance and Scalable Engine

The Product Configurator is built with a high-performance, scalable rules engine, pricing engine, and catalog management to support complex configurations in large volumes.

Key Features of Salesforce Product Configurator

This configurator is also known as the First-Party (1P) Configurator meaning it comes out of box by default when you set up Revenue Cloud. In Industries CPQ, the analog is the out of box LWC Cart (or previous AngularJS Cart). There is the option to instead use a Third-Party (3P) Configurator that can partially or fully replace the First-Party Configurator – we will explore this later.

Composable Design Templates

• Flow Components for Configurator: Purpose-built Flow components, such as Product Header, Product Attributes, and Pricing Summary, form the Configurator template UI.
• Default Out-of-the-Box Flow Template: A default Product Configurator Flow template is included for immediate use.
• Data Manager: An invisible Flow component where config data is mapped between the UI and the source context definition.
• Customizable Layout: Admin users can update component properties to change the look and feel of the configuration interface.

This diverges from the approach of leveraging OmniStudio, FlexCards, and Custom LWCs to drive the Configurator UI like Industries CPQ's LWC Cart, and rather leverages Flow and Custom LWCs.

Configuration Rules

Configuration rules ensure that all products have valid attributes and are compatible with other products in the offering. These rules streamline the product configuration experience, reduce errors, and ensure accurate quotes and orders, enhancing the overall customer experience.

Types of Configuration Rules

• Validate: Ensures products and their attributes are correctly configured, providing user messages for any errors.
• Exclude: Excludes incompatible products or attributes from the configuration.
• Require: Includes necessary products or attributes in the configuration.
• Auto-Add: Automatically adds products to the bundle based on predefined rules.
• Auto-Remove: Automatically removes products from the bundle based on predefined rules.
• Set?Attribute: Sets specific attributes to appropriate values based on the configuration type.
• Set?Quantity: Sets the quantity of a product to a predefined value.

Intuitive Runtime Experience

• Configure Products: Easy selection of attributes and quantities for simple and bundled products organized within component groups.
• Price Visualization: Instant or on-demand pricing available during configuration with detailed pricing elements.
• Product Validation: Quick sanity checks of configured products with user messages for corrections.
• Multi-level Navigation: Supports up to five levels of product bundle structures with easy navigation for configuration changes.
• Configure from Orders: Ability to configure products directly from Orders by launching the Product Configurator.

Amendment Configuration

• Amend Asset and Reconfigure: Ability to amend existing assets and update their quantities or attributes with quick pricing and validation.
• Intuitive UX for Viewing Changes: Enhanced summary component with labels to view changes and delta pricing amounts during the amendment workflow.
• Cancellation: Ability to cancel an asset from the Configurator with proper user confirmation.

This is analogous to MACD Quotes and Orders from Industries CPQ and we can see similarities in the Actions on the right side of the configurator.

Third Party Configurator

As discussed earlier, there is the option to use a Third-Party (3P) Configurator that can partially or fully replace the First-Party Configurator. These can be built by your project team or an ISV partner. The equivalent in Industries CPQ is a guided selling OmniScript that would call the Cart APIs or Digital Commerce APIs and partially or fully replace the unguided / out of box LWC Cart. These can be configured on a per-product basis, so you can drive a separate quoting or ordering process for a home internet product where you would need to enter an address, compared to a mobile plan that is address agnostic.

Headless APIs for Third-Party Integration

• Config APIs Covering All Config Actions:?Granular-level headless APIs covering load instance, save instance, set quantity, add, update, or delete nodes.
• Support for 3P Integration:?Customers can choose a custom configurator UI while leveraging the full benefits of Salesforce Product Configurator APIs as the backend.
• Orchestration of Business Processes:?The config API acts as a process orchestrator governing various processes during a configuration session, such as product qualification, product cardinality validation, configuration rules, and pricing invocation.

Data Model: Quotes, Orders, Assets

From a data model perspective, we notice that Revenue Cloudno longer uses Salesforce CPQ’s (Steelbrick) custom Quote object, but rather goes for the standard Quote and Order objects, following the pattern set by Industries CPQ. We notice that Product Attributes are no longer stored in a field containing JSON on the line item objects, but rather stored as separate records linked to the line items.

Closing Thoughts

The Product Configurator itself has a notable look and feel / UI/UX difference from what we get with the out of box LWC Cart experience in Industries CPQ. However, the concepts behind the scenes are quite similar, including the ability to bring your own UI with Third-Party Configurators, analogous to guided selling OmniScripts. On the rules side, we see Industries CPQ’s Advanced Rules heavily inspiring Revenue Cloud’s Configuration Rules. Finally, on the data model, Revenue Cloud and Industries CPQ follow the same approach of using the standard Quote and Order objects.

We look forward to deep diving with you into Dynamic Revenue Orchestrator (DRO) in our next post.