Weekly Meeting #34

1. Participants & Attendance

2. Progress Summary

• Three principal outstanding issues to resolve to deliver an MVP for Soft Go-Live

  • BCS to implement margin calculations and summary page

  • Zilliant to resolve three outstanding bugs

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

• Line level margin calculations completed and summary page in progress

  • Basic testing at BCS has passed, but significant additional data will be required from Valio to support more detailed testing scenarios

  • Summary page specification has taken longer than expected and development will continue into next week

• CPQ product bugs have been resolved

  • Scripts to update CPQ from Price Manager not running automatically:

    • Found to be caused by automated jobs being interrupted, remaining in “In Progress” status, which prevents the next job from starting

    • The situation will occur frequently in Test because we are updating code, restarting processes, etc., but will be very unlikely to occur in Production use

    • This can be resolved in Test by stopping all automated jobs cleanly before making any updates, and by asking Zilliant to clear all statuses if that process fails

    • Zilliant will meanwhile seek a solution to enable jobs to fail more gracefully when interrupted, though this may not be feasible

    • We will work around this issue in Test

  • Date discrepancies on agreement creation, guidance retrieval and publish: dates now correct, and will close this bug after one more test of the full PM to CPQ to PM cycle

  • Cannot copy net priced items from another deal: fixed

• We now have the first delivery from Zilliant which will enable us to address performance

  • 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

  • Zilliant have delivered a new “call PM” script which will allow us to make one single call to PM for all of the product lines contained within a Product Group Bundle

  • We need to integrate that script into our own scripts in order to determine how much performance improvement this will deliver

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

3. State of Readiness for Soft Go-Live

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

• We still need to integrate the results of those calculations into the Margin Summary Page, along with the agreement-level costs, and to compute an overall deal score

• Before going fully live this feature will require more extensive testing against more complete scenarios, which in turn will require more complete test data to be uploaded to CPQ; this is in hand with the Valio project team

• We believe nevertheless that we can still proceed to a soft go-live with this beta version, which in itself will provide more test scenarios

Bugs With Zilliant for Resolution

Performance

Initial analysis is that the main cause of poor performance is the number of API calls which are made to Price Manager from CPQ. Zilliant have delivered a script which will allow us to bundle many queries together into a single API call, which we will build into our own script next week.

Completion of MVP for Soft Go-Live

Soft go-live date remains uncertain while the performance issue remains unsolved. We are now working more efficiently with Zilliant to resolve this issue, though this work is iterative and will complete when performance is at an acceptable level.

4. Status of Changes

We now have a response from Valio to BCS’s list of changes, and discussions are ongoing.

5. Project Timeline