How to migrate legacy data to Salesforce CPQ

Salesforce CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) is a sales tool for companies to provide accurate pricing with any given product configuration scenario. CPQ applications take into account optional features, customisations, quantities, and discounts, allowing sales reps to quote prices quickly and accurately. 

For these and many other benefits, a lot of companies are moving away from their legacy ERP systems and embracing Salesforce CPQ.  When they decide to sunset such systems and move to Salesforce CPQ the need to migrate their data, configurations, business logic etc comes into play.

In this blog we focus on the steps that you need to follow in order to migrate your data. To replicate configuration and metadata as well as to accommodate the business logic into Salesforce CPQ it requires a more tailored, hands-on approach, which we are often called upon by our customers to provide.

Migrating to Salesforce CPQ has certain prerequisites to ensure that all dependencies are migrated alongside the data. For example, if you are migrating a contract, the associations to the account and the opportunity need to be migrated as well. If this is an existing account within your Salesforce CRM, you will need to map the relevant properties to the Salesforce objects so they can auto-populate when you migrate the contract. 

To perform this task, there is a number of steps that CPQ administrators need to perform to maintain data integrity. To do this they must first understand what type of data they need to migrate:

• Historical and new data, or
• Historical data only

With this in mind, let’s understand the available options for migrating your data into Salesforce CPQ.

Data migration tools & execution sequence

There are various tools to migrate your data to Salesforce CPQ. One thing to remember is that the migration process is implemented in sequence of stages and regardless of the tool, each stage has its importance and must be completed before progressing to next one.

The most commonly used tools for your data migration are the following:

1. ETL Tool – To perform Extract, Transform and perform Load into salesforce system
2. Data loader
3. Integration – SOAP / REST API
4. Custom CPQ accelerator to boost the migration process

In selecting any of the above options, the main point to consider are the CPQ stages on each individual object (or record).

At each data stage the values remain unchanged. CPQ will process the data to match the assigned ‘To Be’ stage. Each stage is guaranteed not to create duplicate records when CPQ processes are running. This is accomplished by leveraging Salesforce’s UPSERT capabilities and using the unique external ID fields on each object.

Salesforce CPQ enables concurrent processing which can reduce the overall stage execution time.

The data migration process involves the following stages:

1. Account Stage
2. Contact Stage
3. Pricebooks
4. Product2
5. Pricebook Entry Stage
6. Opportunity Stage
7. Quote Stage (As Is, To be, Sync)
8. Quote Line Item Stage (As Is, To be, Sync)
9. CPQ Pricing Engine Stage
10. Contract Migration Stage (As Is, To be, Sync)
11. Renewal Opportunity Stage
12. Order Migration Stage (As Is, To be, Sync)
13. Billing Migration Stage
14. Post Migration Cleanup

Validate Data & Processes  

Data integrity and accuracy is a key concern when migrating to a new system. There few points which we need to keep in mind to ensure the integrity of our data:

• Maintaining data integrity. From experience, discrepancies can occur within any of the following fields:
  1. Stages
  2. Quotation Transformation
  3. Pricing Amendments
  4. Contracts Amendments
  5. Renewals Amendments
  6. Term & Subscription
  7. Product Nesting
• Avoid making assumptions on business-related data.
• Using an automated accelerator/script can help validate your data more effectively and faster:
  1. Before you run the accelerator, you need to decide whether your data migration requires Configuration or No Configuration and manipulate the stages for the CPQ objects: Quote/Proposal, Proposal Line Items and Product):
     1. Configuration means migrating legacy data into Quote/Proposal, Product Configuration object with related accompanying data into the CPQ line item object. The data will appear in the cart which can be updated at a later stage manually.
     2. No Configuration means migrating legacy data into the Quote and Proposal line item objects. To ensure your quote finalization is correct, you will need to recreate the rules and logic into Salesforce CPQ so it can be triggered when your data is migrated. Also important to note is that when you migrate historical data with no configuration, you shouldn’t run any business logic during the migration process as there are chances that your old data might be overridden.
  2. Managing relationships/or associations between transactional and non-transactional data model.
• Using automated accelerators or scripts can help match more accurately your business processes like pricing, calculations etc.

Reporting on Discrepancy or Data Redundancy

Discrepancy reporting is also commonly done in Order Migration Stage. CPQ “Successful” migration is defined on both existing and new reconciliations which should give zero discrepancy. Some of the most common sources for discrepancy are:

• Omission of one-time charges, discounts, taxes, or shipping charges during migration.
• Rounding errors. Decimal point resolution.

If you get a discrepancy or data redundancy, here are some of the ways you can resolve it:

• Ensuring that the stages that feed into the CPQ pricing calculation engine, match your business logic for triggering events.
• Migrated orders should never be reconciled manually, as it would break the integrity of the overall process.

You can also prevent discrepancies by performing sample runs of customer invoices and comparing them to existing invoices to ensure they are consistent. 

Same as with the previous stages, there are custom CPQ accelerators which can be utilised to export any discrepancies by running scripts and can help uncover errors more efficiently. At Coforge, we have developed multiple accelerators to help our customers migrate their legacy data to Salesforce CPQ faster and with more accuracy.

If you would like to find out more about migrating your legacy data to Salesforce CPQ, we can help. Give us a call or email us at Salesforce@coforge.com

Other useful links:

Salesforce Field Service Lightning

Getting on the right path with your Salesforce CRM

Salesforce CPQ

Salesforce Services