Revenue Lifecycle Management (RLM) is the latest and greatest Configure Price Quote (CPQ) solution from Salesforce. In this blog post series, we will deep dive into RLM and compare features to the capabilities of Industries CPQ and Industries OM.
Start with our earlier posts before jumping into this post
Performance & Stratus Carta
At Stratus Carta, performance is our middle name, a key focus of all of our services, and embedded in our leadership’s DNA.
Georgii Saveliev, Founder & Certified Technical Architect (CTA), got started with performance testing as a teenager, when he built his first desktop PC with parts ordered the web, spending hours of research, reading countless articles containing countless performance benchmarks to see how to squeeze every last FPS (frame per second) in the latest cutting-edge games out of his limited budget. Once he bought the parts and assembled them, he spent countless hours overclocking, or increasing the clock frequency of the CPU and GPU, to further squeeze out better performance. Fast forward in time, Georgii’s first project out of university was planning and managing a performance and scale test for Siebel CRM at GE Healthcare, used by field service engineers to track and manage their service requests.
Keith Peters, Head of Sales – Performance, has decades of performance experience. Leading Escalation Engineering at Siebel, Keith Peters and his team were responsible to resolve performance issues and squeeze every last millisecond out of transactions to ensure Siebel’s performance worked at the speed of their customers’ business. Fast forward to Vlocity, Keith ran the Expert Services team, applying strategies and lessons learned from the Siebel days, to performance challenges Vlocity customers were experiencing. His team ensured Vlocity scaled to the massive order volumes of Black Fridays and iPhone launches.
Approach
For this test, we wanted to see how Industries CPQ and RLM perform with the same use case on a set of products – a simple, flat product, a medium complexity product, and a higher complexity product. Breaking Industries CPQ performance down further, we tested both with Standard Cart APIs disabled and enabled. In recent customer engagements, we have seen a significant uplift when enabling the Standard Cart APIs, so we wanted to ensure we were testing the latest and greatest in Industries CPQ against RLM.
Leveraging our partnership with TestRunner, their DevOps platform ITAS, and their expert testing team, we scripted, executed, and compiled the performance metrics from both ITAS and the Salesforce platform. In the past, TestRunner’s ITAS was used to performance test the Vlocity / Salesforce Industries product and is built from the ground up with Salesforce Industries in mind. Our joint team has been performance testing Salesforce Industries for 7+ years.
Disclaimer
Before jumping into the results, we’d like to highlight a few points regarding performance. The performance you experience on an Industries CPQ or RLM implementation will depend on a wide variety of factors: product model, alignment to best practices, Salesforce release, network latency, Salesforce system load, and much more.
For this test, we picked a set of products and stayed as close to the out of box experience as possible. In your implementation, you will likely have different products, different configurations and customizations, and many other factors, resulting in different performance results.
The performance below reflects our setup and test conditions and may or may not be indicative of the performance you may face in your implementation. Unfortunately, performance is not a simple topic where we can make statements like “RLM is X% faster or slower than Industries CPQ” – it is much more nuanced.
Also please keep in mind that both products, Industries CPQ and RLM, are receiving regular updates and enhancements, and we would not be surprised if future releases bring further performance enhancements and change these results.
Results
We see a noticeable improvement in CPQ operations in favor of RLM over Industries CPQ, even with the Standard Cart APIs enabled. In percentages, this is up to a ~60% improvement compared to Industries CPQ. Again, keep in mind that your performance uplift my vary based on your products, configurations, customizations, etc.
If you are interested in seeing the full performance report with details about the products, detailed performance metrics, and more, please reach out to Georgii Saveliev and Keith Peters and we would be happy to schedule a call to walk you through our approach and findings.
Closing Thoughts
Stratus Carta is your go-to partner for maximizing the power of RLM. Our years of experience with Salesforce Industries, Industries CPQ, Industries OM, and detailed R&D of RLM, combined with our specialized tools, makes us uniquely qualified to optimize your CPQ performance. We're the only ones with the knowledge, approach, and tools needed to ensure your CPQ experience with Industries CPQ and RLM is top-notch.
Interested in learning more? Let's talk RLM at Dreamforce! Book a meeting with us to discuss how we can help you build a high-performing solution that will elevate your business to new heights.
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