Think Through It All


I made a mistake.

Quite honestly, I make many mistakes but let’s focus on just this one. We are designing Quote to Cash solutions where data setup and configuration has long-lasting implications. We are not designing data for “just a sale” but also for:

  • The potential opportunity
  • Quoting
  • Ordering
  • Invoicing
  • How an order/contract can change (sometimes years from now)
  • How an order/contract can renew (again sometimes years into the future)
  • How these transactions are tracked

So here is the screwup, was working on how a CPQ configuration would work throughout this lifecycle and I went through what I thought were the three scenarios. Sent it off to the team and they came back with DOUBLE that entry. They then did the amazing thing and started testing to see if what I was suggesting for a configuration would survive through all these scenarios.

There have been clients with tens of scenarios to support and some with 2 or 3.

I say all of this to enforce that a good implementation considers MOST of the scenarios and has a solid explanation of why the others are not supported. For complicated organizations it is nearly impossible to support all situations but we can get close.

So stop and think through all the scenarios that are typical. Make a spreadsheet, make a proof of concept, and talk it out with others. Decisions made today have affects for years.


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