How to Build a Product Configurator With the Epicor CPQ Admin?

“How to build a product configurator?” It sounds like a highly technical challenge, but with the Epicor CPQ admin, it’s easy, even for non-technical users.

That’s because we’ve designed our admin to increase the speed at which you do business. There’s no custom coding, there’s nothing to install, and you can maintain everything in-house. 

Launching new products from inside the admin is no big deal. You can customize the front- and back-end UI (user interface) by dragging and dropping, and create granular user roles and permissions with a few clicks.

Below, we look at how the Epicor CPQ admin experience increases speed and flexibility without sacrificing control. And to top it off, our Director of Web Marketing, DJ Monzyk, shares his Top 5 Tips for how to build a product configurator.

Here’s how to build a product configurator with the Epicor CPQ admin:

You could be up and running in minutes.

Our implementation team (or you, with a bit of training) can build a basic but fully functional visual product configurator in under ten minutes. 

Whether you want to take ownership of creating your configurator yourself or want our implementation team to handle that for you, you’ll experience rapid time to value. You’ll be shortening sales cycles, driving efficiency, and providing fully immersive buying experiences in no time.

Forget custom code – build product and pricing rules like you would in a spreadsheet.

Companies new to Epicor CPQ usually run their business in Excel. They have spreadsheets for product rules, pricing tables, product options, and attributes. 

In a less structured CPQ environment, all of this data has to be hand-coded. It’s technically challenging, frequently confusing, and takes ages. 

The Epicor CPQ admin is different. You can literally copy and paste your existing spreadsheets into tables within the Epicor CPQ admin – there’s zero coding required. Adding a new product or product attribute to your configurator is as easy as adding a new row in Excel.

It’s not a major project every time you want to launch a new product.

“Need to add a new product? Great! Give us a call, and we’ll custom code that for you.” 

This is precisely what you will not hear from Epicor CPQ. The Epicor CPQ admin is flexible and straightforward. So much so that non-technical business owners and administrators can add, remove, and update products to their configurators for themselves. You can bring new products to market faster and start seeing value without waiting on a third party.

You’re not dealing with some mysterious black box.

All your data is right there in the Epicor CPQ admin. You can see it, interact with it, and understand how and why everything works. Even if you didn’t build 100% of the product configurator yourself, you can certainly maintain and extend it.

You can fully personalize every experience.

The forms that people interact with when using your product configurator have to be custom-coded with most CPQ solutions. If you want to make changes or try something new, it’s back to the drawing board. 

With Epicor CPQ, these forms (and the web pages surrounding them) can be created by simply dragging and dropping in the admin. You’re free to experiment, try new things, and take a more agile, iterative approach. Responsive layouts and design mean Epicor CPQ works on any device.

You can customize the heck out of user roles and permissions.

User roles and permissions are flexible and highly granular in Epicor CPQ. They have to be. Because we cater to multi-channel businesses. 

Multi-channel businesses need to provide a fundamentally different user experiences to sales reps, engineers, distributors, retailers (B2B2C), eCommerce customers, and more. This could mean providing different pricing tables, catalog options, layouts, or branding.

The Epicor CPQ admin lets you build user roles and permissions for your configurator around the intricacies of your organization’s structure by ticking boxes. It’s a secure, flexible, and fast way to serve multiple channels. 

Don’t just take our word for it; even Gartner agrees that we’re great at doing this: “Epicor CPQ’s support for the direct sales channel, reseller channel and self-service channel is among the best evaluated for this (2020) Magic Quadrant.”

How to Build a Product Configurator – DJ’s Top Five Tips:

DJ Monzyk is our Director of Web Marketing and a master of the Epicor CPQ admin. Here, he shares his top tips for building a product configurator with the Epicor CPQ platform.

Top Tip #1: “Don’t CPQ in a Silo.”

“CPQ is a powerful sales tool. But its usefulness extends way beyond the sale. By integrating Epicor CPQ with your other systems, you can use your CPQ data downstream in your order systems, customer systems, engineering systems, and on the manufacturing floor. You can use CPQ to promote operational excellence throughout your organization. Don’t waste the potential – it’s huge.”

Top Tip #2: “Change more than just the color.”

“Let customers build products and see the results immediately with visuals that really change on the fly. We’ve all seen demos where you click a button and it makes a couch change color. That might have looked cool a few years ago, but that’s not compelling anymore.”

“With Epicor CPQ, you can easily tie data and interaction points to 3D models on the admin side, triggering fundamental visual changes to products. Products can change shape, animate, or morph into something completely different. Epicor CPQ users have all this power to make it real for the buyer, and it’s not hard to do.”

Top Tip #3: “Build personalized experiences for each customer.”

“With Epicor CPQ, you can leverage modern marketing techniques to unlock personalized, high-converting buying experiences. You can use an API to call out to a solution like Salesforce or your ERP to get information about the customer like demographics, past purchases, and which products they’ve interacted with. Use that data to market, upsell, cross-sell, and make recommendations that increase deal size and win rate.”

Top Tip #4: “Build centrally, not linearly.”

“Efficiency is everything when building logic inside Epicor CPQ (or anywhere else for that matter.) Build objects and logic that are high-quality and reliable so that they can be reused, extended, and adapted for new use cases, product lines, and sales channels. It saves a lot of rework in rebuilding logic from scratch.”

Top Tip #5: “Buyer beware: operate in a real CPQ cloud.”

“Epicor CPQ is a 100% cloud application. Our competitors say they’re “in the cloud” or “cloud-based,” but they’re faking it! We’re true SaaS (software-as-a-service), they’re probably running PaaS (platform-as-a-service) or IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) – so dig deep and ask a lot of questions.”

“With SaaS, you have total control. Need an upgrade? No worries – we provide push-button deployments so that you can do it for yourself. You’re not beholden to any third party, and it’s way less complex. What’s the tip? Don’t wait – take control of your environment now.”