Saving Millions by focusing Tech Development Teams

Our client – a leading global CRM / ERP vendor – had an ambitious goal: to enhance its core product from small and mid-sized enterprises into adjacent domains, including enterprise-grade CPQ and order management.

 

Our Client’s Problem

Our client acquired a number of adjacent companies to expand beyond their core CRM / ERP capabilities over the years. These included analytics and IT service management companies. However, when servicing large enterprise customers in specific domains such as Communications and Media – where order management at scale becomes an important part of any solution – our client’s capabilities were not as robust.

The decision point for our client was clear: acquire yet another company or build a more robust end-to-end order management solution from the ground up that integrates with their existing product base.

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Our Brief
Our client set an ambitious goal for us: to investigate the true functional capabilities of four other vendors’ catalog, order management, and CPQ offerings in the market place. Their focus was on two verticals: Communications and Media. Our client wanted us to investigate over 100 technical features that they wanted to add.

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Our Method
Typically, product organizations will establish a product roadmap based on customer feedback and prioritize the features they develop according to what their customers are demanding. However, what happens when you want to sell into verticals where you have never sold before? Or you want to investigate where to prioritize your investment based on industry best practices? 

 

At 4D, we pride ourselves in the Depth of our research – it is one of our founding values. To assist our client, we brought on eight solution architects (two each from four leading Systems Integrators) who had years of experience with their respective order management and CPQ solutions.

The reason we hired two consultants per vendor is our second founding value: Verifiability. In our years of doing technology due diligence, it is clear to us that you always want verification between technical experts.

With each of the solution architects, we ran a consulting exercise where we requested our consultants to share screenshots of technical features of their respective solutions. We then conducted a two-hour debrief session that allowed us to ask follow-on questions.

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Client Outcomes
Our technical due diligence results allowed our client’s product and technology teams to focus their investment efforts, saving them millions in investment dollars:

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• It was clear that the leading vendors in this space did not have the capability to handle and manage complex orders that required integration with the Service Order Management (SOM) layer. Our previous experience in demand-side interviews with communications service providers and media companies showed that this SOM-layer integration was an important technical weakness of most CRM / ERP vendors and the reason why many implementations in this domain failed. 
  
  For our client it was clear that the majority of their product investment effort will have to be in ensuring that the SOM layer is deeply integrated into their solution architecture. This integration with SOM became our client’s go-to-market in the communications and media vertical.

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• ​Our technical interviews revealed the specific functionalities that our client’s product teams needed to focus on. These included: Winback capability, inflight order amendments, allocation management & compatibility management, order prioritization, promotion management, and contract amendments for complex enterprise orders.
  
  Again, this was not obvious at all to our client beforehand and the fact that these were revealed as important technical weaknesses of leading CRM / ERP vendors allowed our client to focus their development effort in directions that they had not thought about earlier – again saving them millions in the process.

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