Buying behavior of customers is ever evolving. An organization’s Configure Price & Quote (CPQ) application serves as the backbone for the sales team to support this evolving buying behavior of customers. Every modern business in the world turns to its CPQ system to produce correct quotes and effectively sell its products, thereby generating revenue. This makes ‘quotes’ a very critical entity for any organization’s relationship with its customers. Any miss of critical clauses or incorrect pricing can cause anomalies in the quotes that can lead to serious losses to businesses.

Anomalies can occur in quotes due to operator data entry errors, incorrect or outdated pricing, varied business lines with varied terms & conditions, competition pressure etc. These reflect in the sales cycle as loss in margin, missed terms and conditions, and lower prices which can pose serious risk for the business. Anomalies like missing of key compliance clauses such as HIPAA, ISO etc. in Contracts or overlooking of items like termination date or expiry date during contract renewals or amendments can cause legal complications. This is where integrating an AI solution with Oracle CPQ Cloud can help business mitigate risk.

Oracle CPQ Cloud provides an automated & centralized system for Products, Discounting, Configuring, Pricing, and Quote functions – empowering sales reps to cross-sell and up-sell, thus increasing margins.

Wipro HOLMES™ is Wipro's Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automation platform. It is the bridge between foundational AI algorithm builders and Applied AI. Wipro HOLMES™ is a one-stop applied-AI platform which empowers enterprises to easily and quickly build and deploy intelligent solutions for their digital and automation journey. The platform offers robust, carefully curated frameworks like Cognitive Search, Cognitive Image Processing, Deep Text Extraction, Intelligent Process Automation, and Intelligent Conversations to name a few, from its repository of services.

Bringing AI to Oracle CPQ Cloud:

Wipro HOLMES^TM AI-powered Pricing and Contract solution complements the features of Oracle CPQ Cloud by providing AI-driven pricing and contract anomaly detection, giving business the complete peace of mind in their Quote to Order process. Machine Learning enables the AI platform to learn and train itself. This learning is then applied to future quotes and contracts to determine any anomalies.

Fig 1: Key Solution Blocks of the Wipro HOLMES^TM Pricing Anomaly & Contract Intelligence solution

Wipro HOLMES^TM Pricing Anomaly & Contract Intelligence solution provides the following capabilities:

• Automates the understanding of lengthy and complex legal contracts.
• Extracts clauses from these documents and further classifies clauses into various categories. This helps in ensuring governance, management of deliverables and obligations, and empowers business users.
• It can adapt easily to changing regulatory and business requirements with simple human feedback.
• Analyzes previous success rates for similar quotes and intelligently provides suggestions for competitive pricing.
• Detects pricing errors induced unknowingly by humans or system generated to protect margins.

The solution can be applied across the organization’s Quote-to-Cash process. Integration of Oracle CPQ Cloud with the Wipro HOLMES^TM platform requires standard configuration and development of APIs to interact with services provided by the AI platform. This can be accomplished in parallel or independently with the rest of CPQ Cloud implementation.

Fig 3: Application stack and implementation of Wipro’s AI solution for various processes

Benefits of Oracle CPQ Cloud integrated with Wipro’s AI solution:

• Error-Free quotes for the Sales team.
• Minimized risk of human error in pricing and contract creations.
• Faster, effortless reviews of Contracts and Pricing
• Standard position of company across contracts, clauses, and business rules.
• Cost savings in effort reduction for the rework and FTE hours due to maximum automation

The Integrated Oracle CPQ Cloud and AI solution can be implemented across industries and business processes. Find below some examples:

Case 1: Enabling ‘One Enterprise Quote’ concept in a Transport and Logistics industry.

An expanding business in the Transportation and Logistics industry always faces the challenge of having various business units working in silos. Oracle CPQ Cloud enables enterprises to have a single quote for all its services and Wipro HOLMES AI solution helps to create accurate pricing with error-free contract and quote documents across business units, taking into account compliance with each of the business units’ regulatory requirements.

Case 2: ‘Always in Compliance’ quote document for Healthcare industry

The Healthcare industry is one of the most tightly regulated industries. Any transaction between a healthcare provider/manufacturer and a customer needs to follow a specific set of rules and regulations, be it contracts, documentation, or privacy. Oracle CPQ Cloud, along with Wipro HOLMES AI platform, ensures all the rules, clauses, and privacy regulations are implemented in the contract or quote document generated.

With Integrated Oracle CPQ Cloud and AI solution, the features of Oracle CPQ Cloud application can be extended to the fullest to benefit businesses in their Quote to Order process across industries and verticals.

Shailesh Bandodkar

Solution Architect, Oracle CRM/CX, Wipro Limited

Shailesh is an Oracle CRM/CX Solution Architect with 16+ years of experience. He has successfully led multiple implementations of Oracle CRM/CX solutions for customers across industries and verticals. Shailesh can be reached at shailesh.bandodkar@wipro.com.