With recent CallidusCloud acquisition by SAP, there has been some confusion about the CPQ solution for SAP CX or C4HANA. For SAP Commerce (Hybris) on-premise version, there has been an on-premise SAP Product Configuration. Or, a CPQ Add-on to enable product configuration functionality for B2C and B2B storefronts. Many customers have already implemented on-premise add-on version of SAP Product Configuration. Or CPQ, for their SAP Commerce (Hybris) B2B and B2C storefronts. Though, for SAP Commerce Cloud version, many customers and consultants ask me if a cloud version of Hybris CPQ add-on is available for SAP Commerce Cloud. Conversely, if they need to integrate with CallidusCloud for CPQ capabilities. In this article, I intend to clarify product configuration or CPQ option available for SAP Commerce (Hybris) Cloud version.
Use Cases
Product Configuration or CPQ has broadly two different use cases. One is for internal Sales Reps who need to configure, price and quote products in their Sales applications. Such as SAP Sales Cloud as per their customer requirements. The second use case is for B2B or B2C storefronts where we offer product configuration capabilities to online customers.
In the first use case, customers running SAP Sales Cloud can leverage CallidusCloud CPQ (now part of SAP Sales Cloud). This enables product configuration, pricing and quoting capabilities for sales reps. For Commerce (Hybris) Cloud with ERP (or S4HANA) as a fulfillment system, a cloud version of Product Configuration is available. You can use this to enable single and multi-level product configuration for online customers in both B2B as well as B2C scenarios. For SAP Commerce Cloud version, the Product Configuration leverages Microservices on SAP Cloud Platform as underlying configuration and pricing engine.
Product Configuration for on-premise and Cloud version are two different products. Therefore they need to have separate licenses. Also there is no upgrade path available between these two products. The cloud version of SAP Product Configuration is NOT a follow up version of on-premise SAP Product Configuration version. The Cloud version of SAP Product Configuration connects to both SAP ERP (EHP6 or higher) as well as S/4HANA. To enable data exchange between SAP Back-end and Product Configuration add-on Cloud version, install SDI (Smart Data Integration) Data Provisioning Agent on your SAP Back-end system.
Notable Differences
Most of the features for SAP Product Configuration or CPQ add-on are similar in on-premise and cloud version, however there are few differences as follows:
- Order Management Scenario: SAP Product Configuration add-on (on-premise version) supports both synchronous order management (SOM) as well as asynchronous order management (AOM), however SAP Product Configuration add-on (Cloud version) only supports asynchronous order management (AOM).
- Product Configuration Characteristics Long Texts: The characteristic long texts of SAP ERP display on product configuration page (storefront) automatically in on-premise version of SAP Product Configuration, but NOT in the Cloud version. To display the long texts on product configuration page in Cloud version, the easiest way is to maintain those in SAP Commerce Back office.
- Pricing Exits: In Cloud version of SAP Product Configuration, only a limited number of pricing exits from SAP ERP Pricing supports (unlike On-premise version that supports all the pricing exits). You should verify the supported pricing exits from SAP documentation during your implementation.
Hope you find this article helpful. For any questions or clarification please don’t hesitate to reach out to me directly!