Pricing Portal

Oracle CPQ 24D provides the following usability enhancements for the Pricing Portal:

• Pricing drawers are dynamically resized to provide quick access to Cancel, Create, or Save actions. This eliminates unnecessary scrolling for pricing drawers with minimal options.
• Administrators can now add a Pricing lookup to a Rate Card Template column for a previously saved Rate Card Template if the template is not associated to any Rate Cards. Prior to Oracle CPQ 24D, administrators had to recreate the Rate Card Template to add a Pricing lookup to a Rate Card Template column.

Beginning in Oracle CPQ 24D, customers can write extensible dynamically calculated interim charge values as outputs to Commerce and the Calculate Price REST API using the new Advanced type Price Models and Scripting Price Model type Pricing Matrix Templates.

Customers in some industries (e.g. communications, utilities, hosting services) price products by blocks of units rather than per unit. For example, a customer may want to price software in blocks of hundreds or thousands and charge a price for the entire block rather than per each user. Oracle CPQ 24A provides the option to use blocks rather than units for pricing. CPQ pricing supports both block and unit pricing for the same product price or charge under the same conditions. CPQ also supports Block Pricing for Dynamic Tier Pricing.

Beginning in Oracle CPQ 24A, pricing administrators can define different pricing for the same service product based on the duration for which the customer is committing. Enhanced subscription price authoring for service durations allows sales users to incentivize customers to commit to longer contract / service durations to reduce churn and the need to resell the service sooner at renewal time.

Oracle CPQ 24A adds CPQ Migration Center support for Charge Attributes, Charge Definitions, and Pricing Lookups and Pricing Lookup Types. This allows customers to transfer updated (extensible) charge schema and charge definitions using migration packages and migration between sites. Migration saves administrators time by eliminating the need to manually recreate components on a different site and eliminates error by ensuring that exact copies of all migrated components end up on the target site.

Beginning in Oracle CPQ 24A, CPQ will provide the following enhancements for Oracle Fusion Pricing integrations:

• Support CPQ Tier/Volume Charges
• Support Block Pricing
• Support Service Durations for Price Model Items
• Provide CPQ Integration ID drop-down menus to allow selection of Integration IDs provided by Oracle Fusion Pricing.

Oracle CPQ 24A delivers the following Pricing Portal UI enhancements:

• The Pricing Portal List Page Manage Columns selection is now persisted for the user to enhance efficiency in viewing and editing pricing data.

• Variable names are hidden by default and are available under the More Details section.

• Rate Cards can now apply Usage UOM and Charge Definition filtering when associating Rate Cards to Charges. Administrators can apply Usage UOM and Charge Definition constraints to CPQ Pricing Rate Cards when defining the card.

When CPQ is integrated with Fusion Pricing, the pricing of included and required standard items of a Kit or PTO BOM in Product Workbench and Pricing Engine is disabled to prevent errors in downstream integration. Beginning in Oracle CPQ 24A, CPQ will prevent pricing of included and required standard child items of a Kit or PTO BOM in Product Workbench and Pricing Engine.

This release also introduces optional Charge Definitions that can be used to standardize charge categories. (e.g. Activation Fee, Call Usage, Data Usage, One-time Pricing, Recurring Pricing), and price types. When enabled, the pricing administrator or product manager selects a Charge Definition first when creating a charge, and the charge type and price type are automatically populated.

Oracle CPQ 23D combines dynamic pricing with static pricing so all pricing types can be defined in the same Pricing Engine Price Model. This enhancement simplifies administration and discoverability of pricing in the Pricing Engine. Dynamic pricing types, such as Tier or Volume Pricing, have been moved from the parent Price Model level to the Pricing Data section within the Price Model object. This allows administrators to add multiple different dynamic pricing type items to the same Price Model. Administrators can also change the dynamic pricing type for a data item without the need to create a new Price Model.

These price model improvements are also reflected in the Product Workbench for Oracle CX Sales integrated customers to allow product managers to define dynamic pricing for products.

Oracle CPQ 23D adds effective start and end dates to the Pricing Engine Price Model, Charge, and Rate Plan business objects. This allows effective dating such as for time-based promotions. If needed, customers can still use Pricing Rules to define the effective dates as well.

Oracle CPQ 23D introduces Pricing Engine Rate Cards to support usage-based pricing for industries such as telco, utilities, and cloud services. These industries require invoicing or rating calculations based on multi-dimensional tables to capture complex pricing rules, such as for phone call or data storage usage. To support this type of pricing requires that Pricing Engine support the creation of custom dynamic matrices for use in determining the invoice amounts to be billed on a periodic basis. Rate Card Templates are provided to specify the custom fields that are included in a Rate Card item. The Rate Card is then used to define the necessary rows and values for the pricing table matrix.

The new Rate Cards and associated Rate Card Templates are also supported in the Product Workbench for Oracle CX Sales product managers to define complex pricing for usage-based charges for a product.

CPQ pricing also writes the Rate Card data into the applicable quote line charge items. This information can be included in document outputs to assist sales users in pricing negotiations. The Rate Card data is also integrated to a subscription billing system and referenced in the downstream flow to an order management or fulfillment system.

Oracle CPQ 23D provides support for the Rate Plan business object to define groups of charges that can be optionally applied to the pricing for a subscription product (e.g. Monthly vs. Quarterly Subscription Plan). Rate plans can be defined within CPQ Pricing Engine Price Models using either the Pricing Portal or Product Workbench (aka Product Launch). Oracle CPQ 23D also provides Pricing Engine UI updates to support the Rate Plans object and to enhance navigation and list pages. These updates improve usability of the pricing UIs, display of multi-column tables, and translations.

Rate plans are also available in the Product Workbench (aka Product Launch) for Oracle CX Sales integrated customers. Oracle CX Sales product managers can now define, select, and apply rate plans for subscription-based products that are linked to CPQ Pricing Engine Price Models.

When pricing is invoked, CPQ Pricing will calculate prices using the requested rate plan. When no rate plan is requested by a sales user, pricing applies the default rate plan if defined, or the stand-alone charges. The pricing output will include the applied rate plan and other available rate plans, if applicable.

Starting with Oracle CPQ 23C, Charges provide a means for customers to define multiple prices for a single product in addition to the legacy Product Prices that continue to display on quote lines and in the configuration BOM item panel, refer to What are Product Prices and Charges?. The subscription economy requires the ability to price a single product with multiple charges. Oracle CPQ 23C provides a productized, easy to implement and maintain means of defining and administering pricing for simple and complex products using one time, recurring, and usage/consumption-based pricing. The new Pricing Portal Charge object in association with the Pricing Engine delivers multiple product prices and charges during price execution for products including simple parts and complex BOMs. In Commerce, the multiple charges will be stored as a child entity of a line item in addition to the line price. Line item prices provide backward compatibility and can be setup with or without charges.