Oracle CPQ for manufacturers: what it does and what it takes
Oracle CPQ is Oracle’s cloud application for configuring products, pricing them and producing quotes. It began as BigMachines, which Oracle bought in 2013. This guide covers what it does, how its rules are built, what it connects to, and what a project involves for a plant that quotes configured products.
What Oracle CPQ is
Oracle announced its agreement to buy BigMachines on October 23, 2013. Oracle described BigMachines then as a cloud-based CPQ provider with guided selling, dynamic pricing and workflow approvals. The product has since been called Oracle CPQ Cloud and Oracle Configure, Price, and Quote; Oracle’s release notes from 2024 on use Oracle CPQ. Its online help still lives on the help.bigmachines.com domain.
Oracle files Oracle CPQ under its Fusion Applications, in Customer Experience, next to Oracle Sales. Oracle calls it a cloud-based application and lists no on-premises edition on its product page. Its release names follow a year and a letter, such as 24A and 25C, with four letters a year.
What it does
Oracle’s product page groups the features this way:
- Configuration. Guided selling, reusable product models, and validation that removes incompatible options as the seller picks.
- Pricing. Price books, promotions, localization, seasonality, multitier and channel pricing, and discretionary discounts.
- Deal guidance. AI scoring of margins, discounts, pricing trends and win probability.
- Approvals. Automatic routing by discount threshold, with approvals on mobile.
- Documents. Branded quotes, proposals, statements of work, data sheets, engineering documents and contracts, in PDF or Word and in several languages.
- Contracts and commerce. Contract generation with eSignature, Oracle Commerce for self-service B2B quoting, and Oracle Subscription Management for renewals.
How its rules are built
Oracle’s help on configuration rules describes seven rule types. Constraint rules limit which values are allowed. Recommendation rules set or change values. Recommended item rules add part numbers with quantities. Hiding, pricing, bill of materials and BOM mapping rules complete the set, and bill of materials rules return the configured structure to an ERP.
Every rule has a condition, checked before the rule fires:
| Condition | How it is written |
|---|---|
| Always true | The rule fires on every configuration. |
| Simple | Values picked from menus, such as material equals stainless. |
| Advanced | A function in BML, Oracle CPQ’s scripting language, that returns true or false. |
Oracle says nontechnical staff can handle most routine administration. Logic that needs loops, lookups or calculations beyond a menu condition goes into BML, and Oracle runs certifications for the people who implement it.
What it connects to
- CRM. Oracle names Oracle Sales and Salesforce Sales Cloud and says Oracle CPQ connects to any CRM. Its 24A release added a Microsoft Dynamics 365 connection, so sellers open Oracle CPQ from a Dynamics opportunity.
- ERP. Oracle says Oracle CPQ works with more than 20 ERP systems, including Oracle E-Business Suite, JD Edwards, SAP, Infor LN and Microsoft.
- Integration. Oracle Integration Cloud includes an Oracle CPQ adapter for building the connections.
Who it fits
Oracle positions Oracle CPQ for the most complex configuration requirements at the largest transaction volumes, and says Gartner has named it a Leader for CPQ applications nine years in a row. It fits mid-size and large companies with complex configurable products, an established CRM and an ERP on Oracle’s list. It also fits companies that want commerce and subscriptions from the same vendor.
What a project involves
The clearest public account is Thermo Fisher Scientific’s, told by its implementation partner. Thermo Fisher replaced Word files, Excel spreadsheets and homegrown quoting tools with Oracle CPQ. The program started in 2015, piloted in North America in February 2016 and went live in April 2016, then rolled out region by region through 2022. A steering committee spanned sales, commercial operations, legal, finance, product management and service, and the company cleaned its own data while a partner and outside Oracle developers built the system.
One global life sciences company is not a benchmark for a 200-person plant. It does show the shape of the work: a partner, BML skills on the team, and data cleanup owned by the company.
Ask which of your rules can be built as menu conditions and which need BML, and who on your side will maintain the BML after the partner leaves.
Where your Excel builder logic goes
If your plant quotes today from an Excel builder, the workbook becomes these pieces in Oracle CPQ:
- Attributes for each input the estimator picks.
- Constraint and recommendation rules for what is allowed and what is suggested.
- Pricing rules and price books for the price sheets.
- Bill of materials and BOM mapping rules for the parts list the ERP needs.
- BML functions for the formulas, loops and lookups that menus cannot express.
Each formula is read, understood and written again in Oracle CPQ’s terms, then tested against quotes the workbook already produced.
Oracle CPQ or an app built from your rules
| Oracle CPQ | An app built from your rules | |
|---|---|---|
| Rules | Rebuilt as Oracle rule types and BML | Read from your workbook, with the same results |
| Strength | Commerce, subscriptions, approvals and documents at large scale | Engineering math, drawings and your own quoting steps |
| Who maintains it | Your Oracle CPQ administrator, with BML skills | Your team, with every rule described in plain words |
| Fits | Large catalogs, many sellers, an Oracle or listed ERP | One product family at a time, starting from the workbook |
ThriveAI builds the second kind. For one product family, the first stage runs four weeks, from the first call to quotes in daily use. Before those four weeks, the first step is a free map of your Excel builder, with its rules and gaps. Converting an Excel quoting workbook into a web app explains how the app is checked against the workbook’s own results.
Map your builder before an Oracle CPQ project
Send Derik the Excel builder your team quotes from. He sends back a free map of the rules an Oracle CPQ project would rewrite, and the gaps.
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