##### DCQO vision beyond FY24 
- ##### Discovery and Insights
	- [x] Summarize transact relevant capabilities from competitors in a slide ⏫ 📅 2023-06-05 ✅ 2023-06-29
	- **Market research on CPQ application stacks:** Gartner report: Critical capabilities for CPQ applications
		- Top apps: SAP, PROS, CloudSense, Salesforce (CPQ), Oracle, FPX, Tacton, Conga
			- CloudSense:
				- Integrates with salesforce sales cloud and salesforce partner communities
				- Pricing: The pricing engine has good support for price lists, sales agreements, promotions, bundles, volume discounts, discount approvals and a basic explanation of how a price was calculated.
				- Transactions: 
					- Transaction support: subscriptions, renewals, amendments
					- Large transaction: Repricing the whole 1,000-line transaction took several minutes, but subsequent incremental repricing took about 11 seconds.
					- Excellent order decomposition and orchestration engine. It supports changes to orders while in fulfillment, subject to customized point-of-no-return logic.
					- Lacks shipping features and integration with manufacturing ERP systems 
				- Deals and Contracts: 
					- The product can quickly generate large and complex proposals. Document templates are edited in Microsoft Word. 
					- Contract redlining is provided by the integrated CloudSense customer life cycle management solution.
			- Conga: 
				- Integrates with salesforce sales cloud
				- Deals and Contracts: 
					- For deal negotiation, supports line grouping, goal-seeking price adjustments, discount approvals, proposal generation and contract redlining. 
					- Displaying a very large quote took about 15 seconds and pricing that quote took about a minute. The product was able to generate a 100-page proposal in about 30 seconds.
				- Transactions: 
					- Conga offers a separate order decomposition and orchestration engine that was not evaluated for this report. 
					- There is out-of-the-box support for tracking and changing orders. 
					- The product has deep out-of-the-box integration with SAP for synchronizing item definitions, bill of materials (BOM) structure and configuration rules from the SAP Variant Configurator. 
					- It also supports inventory checks and sending orders to SAP.
				- Customization: 
					- The latest product release allows customers to disable capabilities to improve performance.
			- FPX: 
				- Best suited for selling complex manufactured products
				- Excellent support for grouping transaction lines within a transaction and generating approval emails and proposal documents. 
				- Edit a very large quote and generate a very large proposal quickly. 
				- Supports goal-seeking price adjustments 
				- Electronic signature via integration with Adobe Sign or DocuSign.
			- PROS smart CPQ: 
				- Uses Salesforce Customer Communities for self-service commerce and provides APIs for integration with third-party digital commerce platforms
				- Superior product selection capabilities: highly usable sales catalog, product search, faceted search, product comparison, eligibility filtering, an import of products from Excel, favorite configurations and  needs analysis flows whose recommendations can be determined by either rules or a machine learning algorithm.
				- lacks productized support for selling subscriptions
				- supports multiple pricing buckets per transaction line
				- Renewal, amendment and termination flows must be implemented for each product sold, although some reuse of the custom logic is possible by linking to a parent model.
				- Multicurrency quotes are supported.
				- For transaction editing, bulk update and goal-seeking price adjustment capabilities are supported + support for Adobe Sign and DocuSign for electronic signature
				- Was able to edit an extremely large quote with good application response times. It was also able to generate a very large proposal within 30 seconds.
			- Salesforce (CPQ): 
				- For manufacturing and high-tech companies running salesforce for CRM
				- Supports subscriptions, renewals and usage based services
				- The pricing engine supports list pricing, volume discounts and coverage pricing. Sales tax can be calculated by a productized integration with Avalara. There is no out-of-the-box support for promotions.  All other types of pricing must be implemented using formulas and custom objects.
				- Deal negotiation is robustly supported by line grouping, goal-seeking discounts, Einstein Analytics for quotes and pricing, integration with Vendavo and Zilliant for price optimization, discount approvals, and integration with Xactly for estimating sales commission.
				- Took 10 seconds to reprice a very large quote and about 40 seconds to save it.
				- Electronic signature: Adobe Sign or DocuSign
				- it must be combined with partner plug-ins to support more complex use cases, introducing additional cost and complexity.
			- SAP: 
				- For simple or complex manufactured products sold through multiple channels. Integrates with SAP ecosystem of products (duh!)
				- Weak capabilities for subscription ordering workflows, minimal support for amendments, cancellations
				- Deal negotiation is enhanced by machine learning algorithms that recommend discount levels out of the box with no customer-specific tuning. 
				- Offers integrated incentive compensation estimation and contract redlining as add-on modules. 
				- Goal-seeking price adjustments and capture of payment details are supported.
				- Able to edit a very large quote and the product was able to successfully generate a very large proposal in less than 30 seconds.
				- Powerful scripting and workflow tool available
			- Tacton: 
				- for heavy manufacturers with complex products and visualization requirements
				- integrates with Salesforce Sales Cloud or Microsoft Dynamics 365
				- the product was easily able to handle a very large transaction and to quickly generate a very large proposal. 
				- Goal-seeking price adjustments, discount authority and price approvals are supported. 
				- There is no support for contract negotiation and redlining.
				- It is possible to check inventory, place orders, track orders and change inflight orders.
	- **Next gen DCQO - Sai - Jul 5th**
		- Shop, checkout have unified their experiences, product/price v4 services coming in now. Clients will focus on v4 adoption now where their footprint becomes smaller and effective.  
		- Client adoption is a challenge. Buy-in from key clients is critical. DSA, Online Unified and B2B. Think about how we will bring client adoption. 
		- Can we go to Chris Cowger along with UX stakeholders' buy-in? 
	- **Felisha call** 
		- Using cart data to generate recommendations 
		- Shelley to work on use cases that will bring out DCQO relevant insights to be built 
		- Bedabrata to analyze DCQO APIs to learn about current capabilities
	- **Ashish: Jun 7**
		- Improve communication 
		- Example: geo-partitioning wasn't communicated, didn't know about availability, 
		- How do we allow customers to transact when other services are down. Offline cart? 
		- PCF contract expires 3 years from now, when we go to other service like Azure, do we have ability to containerize our apps. 
		- Custom rules to capabilities will help immensely in online space. 
		- 96% frictionless CSB, 86% on Premier
	- **Milan, Kelly call: Jun 7**
		- Vision to reality, what steps do we have to take? 
		- What analysis will help drive this further? 
		- #8 and #13 are driving performance, collaboration, converged buyer-seller experiences. 
		- Cost and value should come out in one pager executive summary 
		- What metric are we after? 
		- We can chase multiple metrics, assumption is 97% eRev by EOY, goal will be to take Premier business and get more, John Dalton's team drives adoption. Save money, increase money. 
		- How do you improve, conversion - SRE team can help with analysis on TTI - Sarah McLellon, 
		- How to prioritize? Growth in conversion rate vs efficiency/latency improvements
		- Jessy Williams - value of Premier online, time savings for seller, 
		- Breakdown capabilities into buckets of priorities 
		- Cart to checkout conversion rate - Khushboo, Jessy Williams, BTO analytics - 
			1. [will_matheson@dell.com](mailto:will_matheson@dell.com "mailto:will_matheson@dell.com")
			2. [jonathon.klanderman@dell.com](mailto:jonathon.klanderman@dell.com "mailto:jonathon.klanderman@dell.com")
		- Intake document from planning sessions? 
	- [x] No reply. Stephen Harrington, Bradley Been email to figure out the right POCs to discuss DCQO vision ✅ 2023-07-06
	- **ML propensity to buy** 
		- **Problem**: predict the likelihood of a customer making a purchase
		- **Data collection**: customer demographics, browsing history, purchase history, product interactions, and any other relevant information. Ensure the data is well-organized and labeled
		- **Feature engineering**: Create additional features from the existing dataset that might improve the model's predictive power. For example, you could calculate metrics such as the frequency of purchases, average order value, or recency of the last purchase
		- **Select model and train**: Train your selected model using the training dataset. The model learns to predict the propensity to buy based on the features you provided. Adjust hyperparameters (e.g., learning rate, regularization strength) during training to optimize performance.
		- **Model evaluation**: Evaluate your trained model's performance using the validation set. Common evaluation metrics for classification tasks include accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score, and area under the ROC curve (AUC-ROC). Choose the metrics that align with your specific business needs.
	- **[Hackathon-PreCarts.pptx](https://dell-my.sharepoint.com/:p:/p/shaik_thameem_ishraq/EXSbbdHyNcVHjNorKsaGzvsBQXeEFf6reAlx3bU63Q8c_g)**
		- 70% of ordered carts have only 1 item
		- On Black Friday, Cyber Monday 75% of orders have only 1 item
		- 100 quotes created/min, 50 carts created/min
		- Build predictive purchase behavior of cart items
		- ML models provide feedback to schedule refresh behaviors
		- Decision engine to decide cache usage vs build on the fly
	- **Angela - DSA** 
		- Filter quotes by status - pending GOAL authorization, expired status missing in DCQO 
		- List shared by Angela: 
			- Notify quotes expiring 
			- Notify Quotes with EOL Products 
			- Quotes with no online markers
			- Ability for creating quote shells (with no products)
			- Define and search by Quote type
			- Message code for each message coming thru DCQO – to make more user friendly
	- ##### B2B PremierConnect feedback - Jun 9
		- 
	- **Milan Chetlani** - Purchase online
		- [[Milan Chatlani]]
	- **Jonathan Hindi** - Unified Cart & Checkout
		- [x] Check on few things with Jonathan to help gather more datapoints - 4 open topics in the Teams chat message. 📅 2023-05-19 ✅ 2023-05-22
		[[Jonathan Hindi]]
		Behavioral scientists are analyzing customer behavior, need to sync with them for further discovery –
		1. bo_li9@dell.com is the behavioral scientist
		2. aditya_aggarwal2@dell.com is CSB Analyst
		3. khushboo_mehrotra@dell.com is Premier Analyst
		[[Jonathan Hindi#Jonathan's feedback on Transact Insights:]]
	- **eCommerce strategy - Kelly, Kris, Sumit** 
		- Premier PQTO - Silma Zinane
		- Best in class pillars:
			1.  Omni channel sales - converge both internal and external sales motions. We need to convergence between dell.com and Premier, and between quote-checkout, cart-checkout flows.
				1.  Today, our customers don't understand differences in experience in quote checkout and cart checkout and that causes friction/dropoffs.
				2.  Online, offline capabilities are never in sync. We want to destroy the notion of online and offline. Remove barriers.
			2.  Personalized
				1.  May consider partnering with Felisha’s team on personalization use cases
				2.  Nudge marketing tactics can be explored with transact insights.
			3.  Collaboration
				1.  Digital collaboration on quoting experience - both sych and async
				2.  Collaborative selling: Use case example: Quote generated in Premier -> customer asks question to sales -> seller accesses and modifies the quote doc seamlessly and it is updated on customer portal instantaneously.
			4.  Subscription selling, support APEX purchases.
			5.  Others
				1.  ERP and Global Portal simplification
				2.  SVL purchase is through Nexus.
				3.  Dealing with stocks and real-time inventory status early in the purchase funnel instead of after adding products in cart. This may fall outside of DCQO purview.
		![[Pasted image 20230523131259.png]]
	- **Premier - Multi year vision view**
		- Enhance chatbot purchases
		- Telemetry data integration for usage based recommendations
		- Industry based product recommendations
	- **World class cart & checkout - dell.com and Premier/B2B** - Multi year vision view
		- Recommendations - Quick Add / Buy Now / Single click purchase
		- B2B - automation of procure to pay
		- Nudge users towards higher conversion rate and higher AOV
		- Expand in-cart capabilities, simplified checkout paths.
- [ ] Transact Insights: Review backlog from Jeremy Gallo - [Cart & Checkout Backlog & Prioritization](https://dell-my.sharepoint.com/personal/jeremy_gallo_dell_com/Lists/RICE%20Template/AllItems.aspx?ct=1666121338718&or=Teams%2DHL&OR=Teams%2DHL&CT=1684791971389&clickparams=eyJBcHBOYW1lIjoiVGVhbXMtRGVza3RvcCIsIkFwcFZlcnNpb24iOiIyNy8yMzA0MDIwMjcwNSIsIkhhc0ZlZGVyYXRlZFVzZXIiOmZhbHNlfQ%3D%3D) 
- [ ] Jonathan to work with Jeremy on Usertesting.com check if we can get quick insights around which capability might be more relevant.

##### Kelly brainstorming
- Potential impact is across purchase experience + on cost savings 
	- ePen 
	- eRev 
		- Keep customers online (reduce friction in DCQO wherever customers move to offline purchase experience) - top 3 pain areas
			- Editing quoted quote takes to DSA, DSA will create copy of the quote instead of editing same quoted quote and go for finance approval.
			- Save cart to quote, editing this quote is not possible online. 
			- % proportion of frictioned orders that can be reduced - deeper dive on reason of frictioned orders. Identify how many of those will be solved. 
		- Allow flexible operations in checkout vs cart with automated validations 
		- Performance benefits due to time saved in cart to checkout or cart to quote operations 
	- OPEX Cost savings = 
		- Replace 4 teams with 1 team. Save 3 teams ($800K per team per year) = $2.4M savings. 
		- Any savings in reduction of sales reps
		- Remove orchestration and complexity - savings will be from there - check with Rishab
	- Build cost
- [ ] Action: Create roadmap of how DCQO v4 can look like over 2-3 years... 
- Cart 2 quote conversion steps and OBGateway steps will be removed, performance improvement
- Copy quote steps 
- Phase 1 
	- Define new service and contract
	- Replace C2Q gateway operations and merging cart with quote - 
		- Save as eQuote
		- Validations on quoted quote
		- Automatic refresh on quoted quote
- Phase 2
	- Checkout - cart to checkout will work from new service
- Phase 3 
	- Quote to checkout will work from new service
- Friction vs frictionless data is not super accurate 