Overview

The IBM Sterling Configure, Price, Quote offering enables your business to simplify the selling of complex products and services.

The IBM Sterling Configure, Price, Quote offering makes it easy for your customers and sellers to configure solutions that meet the requirements of the customer. With this offering, your customers and sellers can configure your products easily, quickly, and when they expect it, so they do not need to search other stores for the product solution they need, even if that means settling for a lesser product solution.

IBM Sterling Configure, Price, Quote service simplifies challenging selling processes by automating the configuration, pricing and quoting of complex products, services, and bundles. This streamlined sales process guides customers, sales teams, call center representatives, and partners in selecting and validating the right products and services through web self-service or through an integration with salesforce.com.

Benefits

Automate channel selling to help guide your customers through the selection, configuration, quoting and ordering process.
Centralization of pricing processes for establishing, changing, and communicating pricing for products and services.
Field sellers can focus on generating revenue, rather than low-value processes when they are creating, managing, and negotiating sales quotes.

Solution details

IBM Sterling Configure, Price, Quote service is used to maintain product and service information, configuration, and pricing rules. These capabilities allow field sales and partner channel users to configure complex products and services through the Field Sales or salesforce.com user interface and easily create quotes. These quotes are then automatically distributed for approval.

Omni-Configurator can also be used in a “headless mode” by third-party applications to build complex products in a guided and error free process. The products can then be added to orders captured by the third-party application.

The IBM Sterling Configure, Price, Quote includes a visual modeler that allows customers to build and test configuration models. These models can then moved to the live production environment instance.

The IBM Sterling Configure, Price, Quote is sold as a headless service for integration with third-party applications and as a user license for Field Sales or salesforce.com users.

IBM Sterling Business Center

IBM Sterling Business Center is a web-based application that is used by IBM Sterling Configure, Price, Quote that provides your company with a suite of tools for managing products, pricing, and customers. These tools provide several functions, which include the following functions:

Creating and managing products. Business users can create and apply attributes to products, create product groupings, add products to product groupings, create sub catalogs that can be linked to enterprises or customers.
Creating price lists, coupons, and discount rules that can be applied to different enterprises and customers.
Creating and managing customers, such as to link customers to price lists and catalogs.
Establishing approval rules to ensure that discount levels are only approved by managers with the right authorization.

The IBM Sterling Configure, Price, Quote subscription includes the following features and components:

Environments

Category	Standard offering includes
Production environment	An environment where the final application is deployed and service is made available to the user. This environment has 24 x 7 IBM Support.
Preproduction environment	An environment where your operations team or System Integrator does a final validation before deployment to production. This environment also serves as Disaster Recovery and backup database.
quality assurance environment	An environment where you and your implementation team perform quality assurance testing and user acceptance testing (“UAT”). Additionally, you and your implementation team perform integration and scalability tests in this environment.
Development environment	An environment where your implementation team installs deployable artifacts and executes module testing. Supports developer integration testing.

Security

The IBM Sterling Configure, Price, Quote is hosted in a secured data center and operated in compliance with ISO-27002 standards. The Service does not store sensitive personal information (SPI) or PCI data. If customer payments collection is required, use a punch-out payment or iFrame based mechanism to IBM Payment Systems or any other PCI-compliant payment server provider for processing payments and storing payment data. Tokens referencing the payments can be held within your IBM Sterling Configure, Price, Quote service.

Backup and disaster recovery

A daily backup of the production environment is retained off site. Non-production environments are backed-up at your control as are retained off site.

The service provides disaster recovery to restore the production environment from a catastrophic failure.

Monitoring

The service is monitored to ensure up time of the infrastructure and the application. IBM treats any detected production application unavailability as a Severity 1 support case and then triage the issue.

Maintenance windows

The service has a weekly scheduled maintenance window that is taken as needed for any infrastructure and application updates. You can use maintenance windows, as needed and when available, for implementing new business release updates to the solution. A daily processing window is available for processing larger customer-specific data feeds during periods of low activity on the solution.

Infrastructure and support

Case management is available for support requests. IBM Sterling Configure, Price, Quote Software Support engages the appropriate implementation team related to any issues with customizations.

Updates and availability

The service provides monthly security patches and quarterly feature enhancements.

The service provides an uptime SLA of 99.9%.

IBM Client Success Manager

With the service, an IBM Client Success Manager resource is assigned to provide post implementation relationship management, with a focus on helping you meet business goals. The IBM Client Success Manager primary goal is to ensure that your client experience is consistent and rewarding.

The IBM Client Success Manager develops a deep understanding of your environment, business objectives, operational metrics and stays with you throughout your lifecycle as a client to help you improve product usage and feature adoption.

Other third-party integrations

The service allows external integrations with ISV solutions. You can also chose to integrate with other external back end systems like an ERP or fulfillment systems and front end solutions such as e-commerce websites and call centers. The integrations must follow certain standards. IBM reviews and provides recommendations on the implementation specifications as part of a Solution Assurance Review process before implementation.

Implementation services

You can engage with either IBM Services or an IBM Business Partner for implementation assistance. The offering implementation outlines a sequence of steps to easily design, create, and launch a IBM Sterling Configure, Price, Quote. The implementation activities are performed by IBM Services or an IBM Business Partner through a statement of work. The key implementation activities include the following activities:

Requirements gathering and design
Data and content loading
Configure and customize business process flows
Customize third-party integrations
Testing and deployment
Training
Service launch
Upgrade deployment and testing, which includes modification of customizations

Not Included Services:

IBM Business Intelligence is not available with the IBM Sterling Configure, Price, Quote. Other reporting options are available. For more information, contact your IBM sales representative.

For more information

To learn more about IBM Sterling Configure, Price, Quote, contact your IBM sales representative or visit the IBM marketplace.