Abstract on the final work
Content
2. Salesforce Platform and examples of work with it
2.2 Experience of working with Platform and CPQ process
2.2.1 Description of the process
2.2.2 Description of the development
3. Conclusions and future plans
Introduction
Business processes are essential part of the life cycle of any organization and we can say that in general, everything that happens in the organization is described by set of processes.
As it is known, the process is a stable, targeted set of interrelated activities, which using certain technology transforms inputs into outputs that have value to consumer (client)[4].
Since capitalism era efficiency can be measured by the size of profits that it brings. Therefore, maximization of profits is one of the main goals for an entrepreneur, as well for any organization as a whole. As it is known, in any company the amount of human resources is limited and, therefore, volume of possible work, produced by them, is aslo limited.
So, automation of work, frees a portion of production time, allowing it to invest it in other tasks. Performing which, will result in further increase of economical efficiency of the company.
Main:
• Considered the most important.
• They focus on direct communication with customers.
• Provide value to a customer directly.
• Achieve or exceed company standards.
Additional:
• Formally defined.
• Maintain basic processes.
• Do not have connection with a client.
• Do not provide value to a customer directly.
Management processes:
• Formally defined.
• Coordinate activity of main and additional processes.
• Provide measurement, control and monitoring.
• Do not provide value to the customer directly.
1. Objectives and tasks
Nowdays, business process automation is extremely relevant topic and a lot of companies are willing to heavily invest in this area, as it allows, as mentioned earlier, free part of the human resource and improve the company's image by providing more quality services.
Therefore, over the past few decades, bunch of giants have appeared in this field, such as Oracle and the SAP, which have long established themselves in the market and so, confidently control most of the market.
More recent technology Microsoft AZURE is one of the leaders in Cloud-computing and automation of business processes.
Not so long ago introduced Salesforce platform, originally designed, as the name implies, for automation of processes in sales. This platform had a very friendly interface for its time, and many other different functions allowing it to quickly develop and find its niche in the market to become leader in this field.
Since the Salesforce platform has many advantages, but it is yet little used in the CIS countries, as well as the small number of works devoted to the subject, so publications on this topic are of a great importance for our region, as they will increase the interest to this platform and attract young professionals in this promising area.
In this paper, it is planned to learn features of the platform to better understand both advantages and disadvantages of the platform. And, also to develop project for automation of a business process.
2. Salesforce Platform and examples of work with it
2.1 History of the platform
Salesforce – is a platform developed by an American company of the same name. This platform is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) – system, running as software as a service (SaaS).
Figure 1 – Salesforce platform (7 frames; delay between frames 200 ms; delay between repeats of 400 ms; 33 KB
SaaS (software as a service) system – a generalized model of cloud computing. In this model access to services offered by provider is carried out by means of mobile applications, or via the Internet. The general scheme of the system shown in Fig. 2.
Figure
2 – Overview of SaaS-system
(image source is newmediaguru.co.uk)
Salesforce was founded in 1999 in San Francisco. Currently, the firm has offices in 25 countries with a total staff of 20 thousand.
2.2 Experience of working with platform and CPQ process
2.2.1 Description of the process
During an internship in one of the IT companies in Germany was developed work on the automation of quotes processing.
This project was developed using Salesforce platform in close cooperation with specialists from other departments and experienced developers. I was able to acquire a variety of useful skills and learn some of the advantages and disadvantages of this platform, compared to other members of the market.
The process, to which my project was dedicated, was Configure Process Quote (CPQ), ie, setting up, processing and invoicing proposals from customers. This type of application is aimed at business to business (B2B) and describes the process of drawing up the prices for the product. These applications are extremely important for companies whose products have many options and settings that affect the resulting price and thus requiring the manual invoicing.
That is why now CPQ process is of great interest for a variety of clients, as it is almost an integral part of the sales process. There are therefore large companies, Salesforce Partners, specializing only in the configuration of the process for the other companies. One such company is StealBrick.
2.2.2 Description of the development
This process has already been implemented in the company, but it was previously done using outdated technologies that do not support integration with Salesforce. Since the quoting of proposals for customers is one of the most important stages in sales process, new implementation was needed.
This process has several stages and includes work of several divisions of the company to invoice, check, as well as to add new entries and make updates in the price of existing products.
Therefore, in order to build the process, it is needed to interact with many different departments in the company. For a start, it was necessary to review and analyze existing instrument for processing proposals and examine the logic of its work, to get necessary knowledge for its reconstruction and improvements within the Salesforce platform.
At the initial stage of the project development – design, started with analysis of the market and existing implementations of CPQ process by other companies.
As the result of the study of existing solutions was formed general scheme. This scheme is the basis for most of the products used by other companies. It is shown in Fig. 2.
Figure 3 – A generalized scheme CPQ Process
As shown in the block diagram, the entire process consists of five main elements:
1) Product
2) Base price
3) Addon
4) Additional service
5) Price
The main elements of a product has 4 outer connections. The first connection – with a base price. Base price – the price of a product without any additions, modifications, discounts. The second connection – with the addon. Addon – addition to the product. It augments main product with some specific properties or modify existing ones. The third connection – with the additonal service. The fourth connection – with the product itself. Communication with the product may be required if products have some internal hierarchy and / or subdivided into groups.
Scheme presented in Figure 2 describes a general database structure design of CPQ system.
The product – the main entity of this scheme, describes the object.
Base price – is a separate entity, because it is generally has specific set of parameters such as the number of users of the application, validity of the license.
Addon – allows you to expand existing product functionality, and optionally augment it for the client.
Additional services – services, which can be provided with the product, such as technical support, training and professional development courses.
Upon completion of the database design, creating a user-friendly interface for the user security settings were configured integration with external server for collection and processing of tax information.
3. Conclusions and future plans
During the work were found advantages and disadvantages of Salesforce platform, as well were analysed similar products and development of CPQ process.
In the future I plan to continue to study this business process and others.
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