My review of Experologix MPCpe

We have begun rolling out the long awaited, CRM Quoting and Order Entry CRM (Q&OE) phase of our integration. We have decided to use Experlogix MPCpe as the platform. I can not rave enough about this product, and Experlogix. This company's service is what everyone in the software development and support industry should strive for when putting together a support department.

Fast friendly knowledgeable support on a very flexible platform. They really take time with you and help you not only do what you want to do, but steer you to better ways to accomplish what you want with their product. Christian and Jesse, and others over there, have pulled my butt out of the fire over and over again during the test phase as we corrected my configuration errors.

What is MPCpe?

MPCpe stands for Master Product Configurator with Paraimetric Engineering which is a mouthful, around here we call it configurator. It allows users to rapidly enter opportunities, quotes, and orders in MS CRM. As anyone who has tried will tell you the out of the box MS CRM solution is not workable for quoting at all. Especially if you are integrated. MPCpe comes in two flavors, Quick Quote and Quick Quote Plus. The Plus version lets you create formula based rules

The #1 feature in Configurator is the "Parametric Engineering". Parametric Engineering allows you to build advanced knowledge of the products into the configurator making it seem as if an engineer was doing the order entry. It requires more time in the setup stage, but the savings from preventing incorrect orders and the time saved by eliminating some of the research that data entry, inside sales or customer service requires to the answer questions more than makes up for the initial time spent in setup.

For instance, to use the standard mountain bike examples, you have a mountain bike with three choices of frames, and 3 choices of forks. The frame dictates which fork you can use. Consider that Frame one can use fork a or b, Frame 2 can use fork a,b, or c, and frame 3 can only use b or c. This is intimate product knowledge. If this were the only case, then it wouldn't be a big deal but as everyone knows product knowledge can require years to master. In some places the turn over rate far out paces the ability to master product knowledge. However the Parametric Engineering allows you to easily tell the system, if you use Frame 1 you can select only Fork a and b. Then when the user attempts to enter c it will give them a unmistakable error with customizable messages, and yet allow them to easily recover from it, by just de-selecting the incorrect entry. No tech support calls no re doing the quote or order. Nice huh?

I'll write more about some of the other features later this week, but check out their site, and download the brochure. It's one of the nicest pieces of software I've used, and the people at Experlogix will make you glad you considered them.