Steering Meeting #08

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.

• There remain two principal issues to resolve to deliver an MVP, and we expect to be able to demonstrate progress on both during this week

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

  • BCS to implement margin calculations and summary page

• Some significant improvements in performance have been made in Dev, with further improvements to be implemented and deployed to Test this week

  • Adding a bundle of 400 Product Groups, without performing the associated margin calculations, reduced from 6 minutes to 30 seconds

  • Adding a bundle of 1,000 Finished Goods still takes around 7 minutes; Zilliant implementing similar optimisations to the PG bundles

  • Margin calculation triggers removed from adding or modifying agreement lines, and all calculations run only on Save

• Line level margin calculations completed and summary page in progress

  • One outstanding issue around Drop Cost resolved this week, and being implemented this week

  • We expect the Margin Summary page to be available for testing from that point

• Some other bugs remain, but the above two items are the main headings to be addressed before Soft Go-Live

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

Performance

The principal cause of poor performance has been the time needed to retrieve data from Price Manager into CPQ. This data is primarily needed to support the margin calculations and to provide an overall score for the agreement. These calculations are complex and data-intensive, and are driven by the relationships between finished goods and product groups on different lines as much as by the set-up of each individual line independently. This means that making edits to one line can trigger requirements to retrieve updated data for multiple agreement lines.

The resolution is therefore two-fold:

• Reduce the number of calls to PM which are required

• Make each call more efficient

Zilliant have delivered an API which allows us to replace a call for each line in a bundle with a single call for all lines at the same time. This call has been built into the BCS scripts. Zilliant have also made some technical changes in the database to speed up the data retrieval. All of these changes have resulted in the performance improvements shown below.

• If it is not necessary to calculate the margin when a bundle is added, then scenarios 2 & 3 can be reduced further down towards 30 seconds.

• Zilliant expect to be able to apply similar optimisations to scenario 4 to those which were already applied to 1-3, and hence achieve similar gains. This will be finalised early this week now that their principal engineer has returned from leave.

• The margin calculations have been optimised, as can be seen from the gaps in times between scenarios 1 and 3.

• To speed up line entry, all margin calculations have been moved to the Save action so that clicking Save now updates the margin calculation and saves the agreement. This optimises line entry performance, but does mean that a user cannot see the margin update until they click Save.

• We expect to release the performance improvements so far into Test today

  • This should allow testing at Valio to proceed at a more normal pace by enabling the team to work with Product Groups again

Margin Calculations and Summary Page

• Calculations for both Finished Goods and Product Group lines have been tested at BCS so far as we can, based on the limited lookup data which was available in CPQ

• The requirements for the Margin Summary page are now finalised, subject to no issues arising in implementation, with one remaining issue around Drop Costs having been resolved last week

• We expect to complete the Margin Summary development today, and to make it available for testing during the first half of this week

Solution defects (bugs)

The three blocking bugs in the Zilliant CPQ product have now been removed. We continue to have some open bugs, but these are at a more normal testing level and can more readily be addressed now that we have some progress on performance.

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. Commercial discussions are ongoing.

Timeline & Milestones

Soft go-live date remains uncertain while the performance issue remains unsolved. However, if performance can be addressed next week then it seems reasonable to target a completion of UAT by 13th March and a Soft Go-Live on 16th March.

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 and an estimated date

• 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