Lets look at a couple of questions to determine if it makes sense to make this investment.
Who uses your CPQ tool?
• internal Sales Team
• Channel Partner Sales Team
• Customers
Note: Your internal Sales Team is working with the tool on a daily basis and can probably get around with training and other improvements. Your Channel Partners and direct customers work with the tool only occasionally and would appreciate an enhanced visual user experience the most.

How do your users access your CPQ tool?
• Via your website – w/o CRM (i.e. salesforce.com) • Via your website – with CRM
• on a mobile device (i.e. iPad, smartphone)
• with an offline version of your configuratorNote: If you have a lot of detailed information in your configurator (i.e. information about oil drilling equipment might have thousands of parts) think about how often a user would really use this functionality on a mobile device.
Also is there any requirement to have an offline version of the configurator? If so how would the online and offline version potentially be different? Do your products or services change their visual appearance during the product configuration?
Examples of products that have considerable visual changes as you configure them

  • Cars
  • Motorcycles
  • Furniture

Example of products that don’t have considerable visual changes as you configure them

  • Laptop (assuming a simple laptop with 8GB or 16GB Ram, 256HDD or 512HDD)
  • TV Set
  • Ink Cartridges

Note: There are many more configurable products that change while you configure them, than products that don’t change. Just look at your products and see how much change you have and if that change helps the user’s decision to buy your product. When your product changes considerably as you configure it, you have a requirement for dynamic product rendering.

While there are potentially many more questions to be considered let’s start with the core questions above. Consider also that more and more users require customization of products and they demand a simple to understand user experience. Dynamic rendering of images supports this requirement.