Oracle CPQ vs. PandaDoc

I think CPQ had worked so well for our company because of the widespread nature of our associates and tracking orders that were being placed in multiple time zones. My team specifically needed a way of analyzing these orders to track our progress in real time and sort out any supply orders before they became an issue. If you are in a centralized location with a smaller team then this may not yield much use to you.

Incentivized

As an alternative to other electronic signature mechanisms, I can't recommend PandaDoc more highly. It works, plain and simple. It is less costly - by a lot - than most alternatives, stores signed documents online for easy access, is simple to use by both our staff and our clients, and makes our lives far easier.

Incentivized

• Leveraged automation to minimize headcount costs despite 10% year-over-year business growth, and enabled staff to focus on more strategic tasks.
• Established a flexible CPQ system that scales on demand to easily accommodate the company’s multiple global locations.
• Improved customer relations by reducing configuration time and allowing sales more time to meet with customers and close orders.

Incentivized

• PandaDoc allows our team to create and send detailed sales proposals and quotes with the use of their templates.
• The use of collaborative editing is also beneficial because our team is able to have multiple users edit and comment on documents simultaneously.
• Document tracking is useful because we are able to receive real-time notifications and updates on the proposal process.

Incentivized

• Advanced coding for some areas in config and pricing engine are written in BML. This Java-like code may be a bit tricky for someone trying to write very advanced configuration rules or advanced pricing.
• The flagship system needs to have an easier way to enter in pricing. In the BMX version, pricing is handled through multiple matricies, but in the flagship it is compiled into one ugly rule.
• Customization. Other software comes with tools to help customize the "look and feel" quickly. To get a re-vamped look on the flagship product, you'll need a CSS expert.

• I would like to see the ability to LOCK a field instead of locking an entire block or document.
• I would like to see more standard features that need to be part of the service instead of add-ons.
• Would like to see an option to allow different levels of users than just the two standard options.

Incentivized

So far it is all good with BigMachines, looking for new features since Oracle acquisition has created a lot of expectations. We have outlined our limitations (out of box functionality) in our periodic customer successor advice meetings for a while, hope we get a resolution soon. Also, the BigMachines user license fee has increased a lot in the last three years.

Incentivized

We have been using it for a few years now and find it vital to getting our bids out quickly and accurately to our customers. We can get a request for information from a customer and once we have their basic parameters create a professional bid in minutes. It's actually usually harder to find out what the customer wants than to use PandaDoc and create a document with it

Incentivized

While they have a decent administrator interface (relative to other apps), the part that is unintuitive is the printer friendly output. I view this is as the meat and potatoes. They are very constrained on these abilities. To make a font change is really cumbersome. There is no content management protocol to protocol. This kills us.

Once you get the hang of it, it's very easy to use. There can be a slightly steep learning curve to get fully in on the system. The new editor v2 has really improved usability and allows us to collaborate on documents simultaneously. Once the templates and library items are set up, a new document, whether it be a sales or HR document, takes very little time to complete.

Incentivized

Other than one day two years ago and an hour or two a few times since then due to data center outages, it has been very reliable

We haven't had any real issues regarding downtime as of yet.

Incentivized

It depends upon the day however there are so many failure points with online services, including our internet service, that this is probably closer to 9 with the latest version

As I mentioned earlier - performance is near perfect as I can create, send, adjust my documents. I love the tracking feature as well as I can tell when my documents have been seen and by whom. The only issue I have run into is with saving and formatting - occasionally the file document does not save with the newly assigned name or the content of the document does not stay formatted nicely.

Incentivized

Some specific support personal was good and fixed some problems fast using proper solutions. But when one of them went to sleep when we had critical issues and they do unreported commits to our production environment which caused issues and they were hiding it?? you can not give more than a two (maybe even that is too much). They also failed to add a feature for us which also bring the grade down.

Recently I could not upload a pdf to a contract - support was very responsive and easy to work with. They got back to me the next day with an apparent fix - however when I opened the document nothing had changed. I then could not respond to the rep who was helping me because it was a "no-reply address", the problem still has not been solved and we had to make alternate arrangements to get this to the client. Never had it happen before and was only with this one contract.

Incentivized

They have pretty good training. Our business analysts have been able to go to entry and advanced level training. They have a train the trainer model. Our business analyst attended training, then trained the rest of our staff.

Like with any implementation go into it with a clear and realistic plan for getting the implementation completed and it will go much smoother. BigMachines has a clear process and an excellent staff fort getting an implementation completed we just needed to follow more of it instead of creating our own roadblocks

Implementation was before the time I was here at Riafox, however, support has been great in assisting to merge spaces and upgrade to 2.0 Editor.

Incentivized

We debated a few different options, including a home-grown custom program, uCommerce, and just using only Oracle Commerce Cloud. Since we had already decided to use Oracle Commerce Cloud over uCommerce, the integrations available between OCC, Oracle's ERP system, and Oracle CPQ definitely seemed like the easiest option with the greatest benefits. However, the cost/benefit of Oracle CPQ was more apparent when we were ready to launch more complex configurations across all of our product groups.

Incentivized

PandaDoc is a more polished, professional, and 'legitimate' software site than other solutions, since PandaDoc really specializes in creating professional proposals, quotes and invoices. The eSignature capacity and pricing table capacity embedded in the documents as well as fillable fields, pre-made, customizable and reusable templates also make PandaDoc stand out.

Incentivized

I agree. We have created folders for multiple departments and have been successful with the usage.

Incentivized

• Sales Operations or IT would have a better understanding of the license user costs and ROI. I do know that Sales has experienced frustrations in the the lead gen-to-close process and have experienced delays with some deals. In other instances, the software has worked fine. I would love to see an analysis on how our lead-conversion rate, sales cycles, and proposal volume stacks up.

Incentivized

• We have greatly increased the efficiency in which we can get signatures from individuals for documents and increase productivity.
• We have been able to find older documents very easily.
• W-9 have been very difficult due to Section 3, but this was addressed with conditional logic

Incentivized