Solution- Sensing devices with flexible discounting and Unique configured item identity
Contributor: Raja Mohan Ivaturi
I came across a customer assembling and selling the sensing devises and had the following business scenario to be supported by Oracle E-Business Suite. Your feedback is requested.
The Business Scenario:
The Customer makes the end items in Assemble / Configure to Order scenario with many optional sub-assemblies and options components.
1. Customer sells various combinations of the optional items and assembiles under the generic Bill of the end items based on the choice made by the customers at the time of order entry
2. Customer quite often offers discounts to the customers based on certain options of sub-assemblies / components. For example out of options A,B and C of certain part, customer offers 10% discount whenever the customer opts for the optional item A. In the similar manner the customer offers discounts and special prices on many such combinations.
3. The customer identified some popular combinations of these configure to order items, that are frequently ordered, and defined such combinations as Pre-configured items. Through this the customer wanted to have special focus while planning on the popular end items as well s avoid the cumbersome configuration process from hundreds of options
4. The customer also wants to track the sales and performance of each combination from the configure to order items and hence wanted to have unique identity of each item with specific combination of optional items.
Original solution: the customer did the below setup to address the requirements of above scenario:
A. Defined the Configure to order ATO models
B. Defined the discounts in Advanced pricing with optional items as qualifiers
C. Defined Pre-defined items for some of the popular combinations from the ATO models.
However the customer faced the following setbacks.
* Problem 1:
1. Sales Rep enters the Popular item when the configuration selected by his customer is one of the pre-defined configured items to avoid cumbersome selection of large number of optional items through Configurator
2. By Oracle Functionality, the Price of the item is however picked up from the item master as calculated at the time of pre-configured item creation
3. The discounts to be applied on the optional items were bypassed when the pre-defined items were directly entered in the sales order. The price of the predefined item is directly taken and no pricing calculation was taken place as it happens only while new configured item was created. So the customer decided not to use the Pre-configured items and always go through the Cumbersome configuration Process
a. This made the order entry cumbersome (Problem 1: Lengthy Order Entry)
b. Customer lost the visibility on tracking the sales of most popular items as fresh configuration every time even for the same combination. For example if you choose options 1,2,3 in one order an unique configured item A is created and next time when you choose the same items another configured item id B is created and there is no way you can understand that these items A and B are same and ordered more number of times. (Problem 2: No Visibility on the popular configurations)
4. The customer hence decided to bypass the pricing and redeveloped all the pricing definition in Configurator rules with heavy customizations
5. The Prices are calculated in the Configurator while choosing the optional items
6. However the Configurator performance was drastically reduced and selecting the large number of options every time reduced the Order entry and configuration process very long time (Problem 3: Performance Issue)
In summary there are three major issues due to which the customer was not happy even with the Oracle Application offerings:
1. Problem 1: Cumbersome Order entry Process as Pre-configured items could not be used. In case we want to use the Pre-configured items and reduce the Order entry, than the Pricing definition would be bypassed
2. Problem 2: Switching OFF the Match feature and relying on the Order entry plus Configuration Customizations, removed the visibility on the Popular Configurations and doesn’t give Business Intelligence and decision making opportunities
3. Problem 3: Heavy logic included in the Configurator to redo the entire Pricing logic created serious Performance issues
Solution
I provided the below solution with very minimum Customization and meet all the requirements.
1. Set the Configure to Order models as it is.
2. Set the Standard Match ON. The Existing configured items including the Pre-configured items will be picked up whenever the same combination is selected by the customers.
3. Set the predefined items as they are
4. Write the configurator rules to default the option selections based on a value equal to the predefined items. You need to create some non-BOM options referring to which the Configurator rule will make selection of optional items that should go for the pre-defined item
1. While doing the order entry, if Sales Rep knows the item is known popular item, he/she still launches the configurator but enters the first non-bom option (Feature) as the predefined item code.
2. The configurator rules based on this input defaults the optional items. The user need not make the cumbersome selection.
3. Submit the configuration
4. All selected options are loaded as Order Line items under the ATO Model
5. When configured item creation is triggered, the pricing engine looks at the selected lines and apply all the pricing rules defined
6. However the Configuration match function picks up the same predefined item but with the price calculated as per the pricing rules for selected options.
7. Because the match is ON the customer was able to track the sales by unique combination of options (configured item codes) that help the business intelligence and decision making
Finally ensured that all the issues have a portion of solution addressing them by preparing the matrix below:
Highlights
1. The solution has very basic configuration effort in setting up the configurator rules to pre-select the options for Pre-defined items
2. There was almost ZERO Customization
3. All great features of Configure to Order were effectively used
4. All Business Requirements were met to the full extent.
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