A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure to meet the SAP CPQ Product managers in person at the Configuration Workgroup (CWG) conference, and we discussed some of these new and other upcoming features. I can tell you that CPQ is in capable hands, and they truly understand customer challenges. In fact, they often reach out to implementation partners like eLogic to better learn what drives the designs that we are putting in place. The details of this release are shared (and will be updated) here.
Let’s move on to my 5 favorite features and improvements included in the SAP CPQ 2211 release:
#1. Variant Configuration (VC) Integration Improvements
There are a few improvements that will facilitate CPQ projects with VC.
Preserving Manually Added Attributes on Synchronized Products: For some customers, we must keep additional information on the product, and we need attributes for these data. However, each Knowledge Base synchronization used to wipe these out. From now on, they will stay and live forever!
Mapping Characteristics Description to Attribute Hint: Even better – more data can really come from your VC model thus requiring less maintenance in CPQ. With this, it’s even easier to populate the little with information that will help your sales team by giving information on specific configuration attributes, including explanations of features or additional details they might not know by heart.
Pricing Attributes Resolving as Multiple Values: We are now able to pass multiple values to a single pricing attribute for SAP Variant Configuration and Pricing Services. This will allow for more advanced pricing design and provide an additional tool to solve pricing challenges.
#2. SAP Cloud for Customer Integration for Quote 1.0 – Pre-Actions and Post-Actions Enabled on Copy Quote Action
Both Pre- and Post-actions can now be used with the C4C copy action. This means we can work on the data both before and after the actual copy happens. This will save time on implementations and will improve the quality of the solutions.
#3. Quote 2.0 – Margin Health on Product Types and Totals
The Margin Health indicator has always been one of the most appreciated features. It clearly indicates where you are in terms of margin, based on company policies. It is now supported on Quote 2.0 – we can’t wait to bring this in for our customers!
#4. Quote 2.0 – Scripting Support for Solution Design
Yes, you read that right. We can now create and delete sections from the IronPython scripting! No need to go back to the big REST APIs. This will facilitate our work by simply using the IronPython methods – a big time saver for implementations. Combined with the recent addition of the possibility to loop on products as well as sections in document generation, this is awesome! To push this capability even further, I created an Influence Request to get the same for Teams. Feel free to vote for it!
We know Solution Design isn’t widely used yet because of its newness and availability in Quote 2.0 only. If you are ready to reach the next level and sell Solutions instead of just products, keep an eye on it. We are already transforming this into very good solutions for multiple customers.
#5. Quote 2.0 – Proposal Related Actions Enabled
This has been a key missing feature on Quote 2.0. In a continual effort to reach feature parity between Quote 1.0 and Quote 2.0. SAP has now closed this gap. Therefore, it is now possible to add the Accept/Reject/View Proposal actions as well as the Propose Changes action to your workflow and let the recipient of the quotation communicate their desire more easily with the sales team.
Other things to consider:
For those who are already using Quote 2.0, make sure you revisit your Quote Visibility rules as they are now required and enforced. SAP will add a “see all” rule to avoid users not seeing any quotes, but you should keep an eye on this one.
UI Template changes - This requires manual intervention if you customized the Responsive Template FavoritesPage.
That’s all for now – hopefully this overview is helpful for your CPQ team. I am also curious, what are your favorite features of this CPQ 2211 release?
About the Author
Patrick has been in the SAP ecosystem since 2007, working on Configure Price Quote, Variant Configuration, integrations, sales, and more, both on the functional and technical side. He is eLogic’s Manager, CPQ Solutions Lead, with more than 15 years of experience in SAP ECC and S/4HANA Implementation and Development with deep expertise in the VC, SD, and MM modules, and largely focuses his time now on SAP CPQ. Patrick also serves on the Configuration Workgroup (CWG) Board of Directors.