In today’s world, customers request access to the product everywhere, from the computer, mobile phone, kiosk, etc. The enterprise needs to present product info, sell products and services across multiple channels and they need to respond quickly before competitors do.
This requires a very agile architecture that can evolve quickly and support rapid new product release cycles to add new products and new sales processes to expand distribution and increase revenue.
The easiest and fastest way to get there is by adapting Composable API based CPQ architecture.
Composable API foundations
Veloce CPQ platform is built from day one in composable API architecture. It exposes all CPQ functionalities as stateless REST(ful) APIs in the backend and has the front end interact with backend through restful APIs like in the following architecture.
Veloce Available APIs
We have following basic APIs:
- Product catalog API: retrieve the product catalog, search catalog, run product eligibility rule.
- Product Model API: retrieve product model information like product structure, product option and UI definition etc.
- Configuration API: run configuration engine against the current configuration and return the new configuration. If the rules or constraints are violated, the error messages will be returned.
- Pricing API: price all line items and return price info such as charge type, net price, unit price, price waterfall, group price, etc.
- Approval API: run approval rules against the line items and return the line items or charge items that require approval with the approval messages.
- DocGen API: generate document using the quote data and predefined document template, merge document, etc
- Subscription Management API: convert quote to order, activate order to create asset, query assets, build projected assets with active order, generate delta quote, modify, renew, cancel assets.
- Salesforce API: do CRUD operations against any Salesforce object, invoke any restful API exposed in the salesforce environment.
- Quote and Order API: query and save quote or order with header, line items and price info for each line item.
High Performance APIs are crucial to e-commerce applications where UX is key
With the above APIs we can implement any CPQ processes. Veloce APIs are high performance without any Salesforce governor limits like CPU and query.
We can pull any size of data from Salesforce, make changes to these data and sync them to Salesforce.
This is perfect for an ecommerce channel where performance is key to UX for the visitor.
Our APIs are platform agnostic too. We can run them on any cloud platform with salesforce or our own database.
Low Level APIs used to build High Level APIs Dynamically
The above list of APIs are generic and low level.
API consumers need to know how to use different APIs. For example, to perform operations like Start Configuration, Retrieve a List of Products, Add a Product to the Configuration, Save the Quote, etc. API consumers need to know the product structure and sequence of API calls.
We decided to help with this by building an API composer where API consumers can build high level APIs dynamically using low level APIs. They can use our point and click adm tool to build any REST(ful) APIs they want by writing javascript to call different low level APIs and transform the result to the format they need by the client side.
How Composable API is used in quote to cash processes
For example, API consumers want to start a configuration from a quote with Quote ID and return the configuration with price information. This composite API can be implemented by calling quote API to query quote with quote line item, call configuration API to validate configuration, call pricing API to price the line item and return the configuration result with price information.
Another example is that API consumers want to add a product into a quote identified by Quote ID. We can add another step in the previous example to add a line item into the configuration.
You can see with the API composer, API consumers can implement any quoting processing and expose it as high level APIs.
This enables customers to expose any CPQ functionality as a REST(ful) API quickly.
Veloce’s API based CPQ architecture is the perfect commerce stack addition
Veloce’s composable API based CPQ architecture is an agile platform that enables our customers to implement new CPQ processes and adapt to the constantly changing business requirements quickly.
We have customers that leverage our APIs in customer portals to create beautiful partner quoting and customer self service experiences.
