Steering Meeting #06

Where are we to date…

The UAT Sprint has been extended and is still ongoing. Priority now is to have a Minimal Viable Product with which to launch the Soft Go-Live phase and to get the sales teams involved with more extended testing. This will get us to a position where we can launch a full Go-Live, subject to the availability of the new SAP system at that time.

The principal remaining tasks to enable Soft Go-Live are:

• BCS to complete the margin calculations and the Margin Summary page

  • We expect to have this page ready for testing early next week

• Valio to provide look-up data to support the margin calculations

• Zilliant to resolve two outstanding bugs in the CPQ product

  • Agreement start and end dates changing due to different time zones

    • Root cause found to be that dates are captured in CPQ with a time component, which needs to be removed for all dates which are held

    • Zilliant expect to provide a delivery date for the fix on 29th Jan

  • Unable to copy lines from one agreement to another

    • Fix promised for 28th Jan

• Zilliant, supported by BCS, to get CPQ performance to an acceptable level

  • Zilliant believe that the main performance issue is the number of API calls made to Price Manager, and we are working with them to reduce the number of calls which are required

  • For this reason, it is not believed that increasing the CPU power of the server would have much impact on performance at this stage

• All sides to resolve any further blocking bugs which arise from the current UAT

This extension to the UAT phase does not yet impact the overall Go Live date due to the delay in the SAP project.

Project Overview

Solution defects (bugs)

The biggest brake on recent progress has been slow resolution of bugs in the Zilliant CPQ product. This has been escalated within Zilliant and we now have a daily forum with Zilliant technical teams to provide a clearer focus on their resolution. This forum was put in place at the start of this week, and we are optimistic that this regular and direct contact will speed up the resolution of the issues.

This same forum will drive the work on performance improvement, and will enable more direct contact between BCS and Zilliant technical teams and more effective co-working than has been possible up to recently.

New Features

The only change requests currently in progress relate to the Margin Summary functionality. The table below summarises the hours worked already which have been submitted to Valio for invoicing, and the hours which have been worked but not yet submitted. We are working to obtain estimates of the work required to complete the items in progress and items which are not yet started, and will share these with Valio this week.

Timeline & Milestones

The updated roadmap, accounting for the delayed UAT phase, sets the initial deployment for mid February for the soft go-live.

Given the delay in the SAP go-live, planned for May 2026, the soft go-live may extend longer than anticipated. This adjustment considers user and data readiness for an effective go-live, now planned for April 2026.

Project Status

What does this all mean…

• We are not yet ready to commence the Soft Go-Live phase and to involve the Sales teams

• We have a clear set of tasks which will allow us to proceed to the Soft Go-Live

• Once we are in the Soft Go-Live, we should devise an alternative strategy to enable the CPQ system to function independently of SAP integration and gain benefit before SAP is ready

  • Recover data manually from the SAP systems for integration into Price Manager, the primary data source for CPQ.

  • Perform regular manual updates as needed

Open Discussion / Q & A

Wrap-Up & Next Steps