The enterprise companies of the world—especially those in health and life sciences, high tech, and manufacturing—require a Quote-to-Cash solution that can model the deep complexity of their products. Salesforce Quote-to-Cash and the products we work with are designed to handle this complexity and allow you to extend your offerings even further in the recurring revenue side of the world.

In this installment of the Simplus Product Series, we’ll dive into nested configurations and subassemblies as a way to further optimize your product catalog in these enterprise situations. 

Assemblies and Substructures

Before we get started, it’s essential to understand some terminology about the configuration language we use in this article. Generally, it all begins with quote lines. Quote lines represent the bill of materials required to create the products that your customer needs. The bill of materials typically starts with one root element known as the assembly. It’s synonymous with bundle or model. Underneath the assembly, there could be an infinite number of subassemblies depending on the complexity of the model.

The nested Bill of Materials

Many businesses have a relatively straightforward single-level Bill of Materials with one parent assembly and a handful of child line items. But when you get into the enterprise space, the orders of magnitude become more complex! For many companies, it’s not enough to have just one parent configuration and a bill of materials. There are often multiple levels of nested configurations inside one and another. This happens when you can configure various distinct elements within a single assembly. Practically, this means that, within the configuration, you can create individual miniconfigurations with each Salesforce bundle.

Manufacturing and beyond

We can go even further in this regard by actually directly mapping the bill of materials to many popular backend manufacturing systems like Oracle, JDE, or SAP by subdividing the configurations and mapping to structures like ATO, PTO, and CTO substructures in Oracle’s EBS system. We’ve even generated specs, cut sheets, and blueprints from popular tools like KBMax’s 3D Configurator. What this means for your business is that you can eliminate manual touchpoints in the Quote-to-Order process and automate the process of manufacturing from the front office to the back office.

And it’s not just manufacturing that can benefit from expertly integrated nested configurations and subassemblies—the possibilities in every industry are endless. Stay tuned to keep learning more about your product catalog and CPQ’s capabilities to transform it with the Simplus Product Series!