Quote-to-Order (Q2O) Systems Features and Functions
Quote-to-order (Q2O) solutions (sometimes known as configure, price, and quote or CPQ) enable manufacturers to mobilize their mass customization initiatives. These systems can reduce time-consuming quoting and ordering processes, decrease unit costs, and lower sales costs. Q2O suites can further help enterprises increase sales effectiveness across all channels. These solutions help companies that sell complex products and services shift their focus to customer-facing sales and service issues.
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Document Management (for Proposals and Contracts)
Document management is the maintainace, indexing, and storage of documents. They can be accessed and managed dynamically.
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Pricing Management
Pricing is the process of assigning a price to an item or service described in a sales or purchase order. It is determined by a number of factors including, a fixed amount, quantity or sales break, sales promotion, etc.
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Reporting and Analysis
Reporting and analysis software allows users to generate ad hoc queries, create metrics, develop reports, connect with data sources, circulate information, etc.
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Product Technology
This group of criteria defines the technical architecture of the product as well as the technological environment in which the product can run successfully. Criteria include product and application architecture, software usability and administration, platform and database support, application standards support, communications and protocol support and integration capabilities. Relative to the other evaluation criteria, best practice selections place a lower relative importance on the product technology criterion. This apparently lower importance is deceptive because the product technology usually houses the majority of the selecting organization's mandatory criteria, which generally include server, client, protocol and database support, application scalability, and other architectural capabilities. The definition of mandatory criteria within this set often allows the client to quickly narrow the long list of potential vendors to a short list of applicable solutions that pass muster relative to the most basic mandatory selection criteria.
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Product Configuration and Presentation
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Quoting and Ordering
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Customer and Partner Support
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Deployment and Administration
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Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Features and Functions
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