Weekly Meeting #35

1. Participants & Attendance

2. Progress Summary

• Two principal outstanding issues to resolve to deliver an MVP for Soft Go-Live. We are working to simplify both as an aid to their resolution.

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

  • BCS to implement margin calculations and summary page

• Performance is showing some improvement, but is not yet at an acceptable level

  • Improvements have been made in data retrieval and processing times and further opportunities are being pursued, but further optimising and tuning may still not bring times down to an acceptable level

  • We and Zilliant increasingly believe that we should additionally review the processing sequence to minimise the required processing, which would require both commercial and technical input

• Line level margin calculations completed and summary page in progress

  • Calculations for Margin Summary are proving even more complex than expected, and discussions on specification are still ongoing

  • The complexity of the calculations and the need to store and retrieve data to support them is another factor impacting performance

  • We are working with Tomi to simplify the calculations and to reduce the volume of intermediate results which must be stored

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

3. State of Readiness for Soft Go-Live

Performance

• Some good gains have been made, but response times are still at an unacceptable level and it is not clear whether further optimisation can deliver acceptable times.

• Problematic processes include:

  • The time needed to add a Product Group Bundle of 400 lines

    • This was the original bug which was raised

    • The delay is caused by the need to retrieve and store lookup data relating to the lines in the bundle

  • The time needed to execute the margin calculations

    • These calculations are proving even more complex than we knew they were

    • Many intermediate results are calculated and stored, which adds significant time to the calculation

    • On discussion with Tomi, many of these intermediate results are needed for testing purposes and will not be viewed by Sales team users

    • This insight offers possibilities for reducing the data storage requirements and hence reducing the computation time

  • The frequency with which margin calculations are triggered

    • Agreement margin can be affected by adding or removing lines, or by updating prices, volumes or discounts

    • Each update triggers a re-calculation, which exacerbates the performance issue above

• BCS and Zilliant can see ways to reduce the above processing requirements, though there are impacts on the user experience. Initial possibilities include:

  • Since there is almost always a PG Bundle on an agreement, that PG Bundle could be selected when setting up the agreement, the initial processing could be done in background, and the user could pick up their agreements later once this when processing is complete. The CPQ interface would become free in the meantime for the user to perform other tasks.

  • The margin calculations could be executed only on saving the agreement, and again this could be performed in background. The user would pick up and and review their agreements later.

  • Margin re-calculations could be triggered manually, and again could take place in background to free up the CPQ interface for other tasks.

• We propose a workshop between Valio, BCS and Zilliant to identify possibilities and to find the an acceptable compromise between user experience, immediacy of information, and technical feasibility of processing.

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 are still working to generate the Margin Summary Page from these calculations, along with the agreement-level costs, and to compute an overall deal score

• As noted above, the complexity of these calculations is impacting performance as well as the delivery schedule, and we are working with Tomi to determine whether and how this complexity can be reduced.

Status of Bugs

We have had a slight uptick in outstanding bugs while working on performance and margin calculations.

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