Tacton CPQ Configurator
Engineer your products for optimized customer choice with a product configuration you can trust. Sell with certainty – quote with confidence.
How can Tacton product configuration solutions help your business?
How do you ensure that the individualized product variants you offer meet the customer’s needs, are buildable, deliverable, serviceable and compliant – all at the same time, without involvement of sales engineering in every quote?
Our award winning product configuration solution enables you to define a company shared product definition, capable of generating millions of valid and profitable product variants all with an easy user interface for your sales team. Don’t fight product variance – embrace it.
Product modeling capabilities: Setting up your product variance in the back office
Product structure suited for manufacturing
In Tacton you will recognize the product structure from your PLM, including Assemblies, Sub-assemblies, Positions, Modules, Parts, Domains and Attributes. You can reuse modules and assemblies in multiple positions in your solution, e.g. wheels for a truck. This makes product modeling easier and minimizes maintenance work for your Tacton product model.
Watch this demo video to learn more on the building blocks of a Tacton configuration model.
Managing your product variance with attribute constraints
Use smart attribute constraints – in addition to combination rules – to express how modules and parts are allowed to be combined. Rather than defining what, Tacton constraints define how modules can be combined, based on the properties of those modules. By separating data from logic in this way, new parts, components and modules can be added without changing the logic, minimizing maintenance and errors. Using the simple process offered by our system, you can configure your product experience to work according to a set of rules that will make your team’s jobs much easier.
Need-based configuration – Automatic translation of customer needs into technical solution and 100% correct sales Bill-Of-Material
Connect your product architecture to customer needs and sizing, driving the selection of modules and parts in the configuration. This empowers your non-technical sales staff, partners or even customers to configure error free complex products with questions they can understand. Let the CPQ configurator create the technical solution and let your sales staff focus the customer dialogue on what they know best – customer needs and business outcomes. Read more in this blog post.
Optimize the solution on the customer’s purchasing driver
If there are multiple valid solutions, you can define default values or search strategies to select a preferred solution among the valid ones, for instance minimizing weight, maximizing Eco-friendliness or maximizing performance. With needs-based complex product configuration Tacton selects the right solution. With optimization, Tacton selects the best solution for the customer’s purchasing drivers. These configurations not only make it easier to sell your products but also enhance the service you can provide your customers, offering multiple options in each field while still optimizing for the best outcomes.
Break your internal silos – consider all aspects of the configured product to secure a profitable deal
Take into consideration all aspects of the product when defining the business logic of your product model, including customer needs, sales channels, market specific compliance, order fulfillment and serviceability. By considering the full picture of the product journey already at the time of quote, you minimize downstream surprises and secure profitability of the deal – across your organizational silos. Say goodbye to project margin degradation with our CPQ configurator.
Design the configuration interface for your sellers and buyers
With the View Designer, you craft what questions you would like to present to the end users, and how those questions should be presented. This includes drop-downs, radio buttons, image options, free text, mandatory fields etc. as well as full page layout control and step-by-step presentation. You can for instance present different set of questions for your expert sales reps, your non-expert resellers and end customers, even if they are based on the same product model.
Validate the configured product
Validate, simulate or calculate the configured product in external system before presenting it to the customer, ensuring that its performance is in line with customer expectations. The engineering calculations from your simulation software can be automatically embedded into the quote or be used as input parameters when refining the product through a reconfiguration.
Learn more about Tacton CPQ Product Validation in this video
System Configuration: Configure anything – with performance
If you are selling large systems of interconnected and interdependent products – for instance HVAC, plant designs, production lines or pump systems – you know it can be a challenge to make these configurable in a CPQ system. With Tacton CPQ’s System Configuration you can split large configuration problems into smaller chunks, thereby avoiding performance issues. You can let your sales reps reorder and rearrange the chunks in the system, while still ensuring valid overall system configuration. You think your product is too complex for a configurator to handle? Well, think again. Learn more about System Configuration
Front-office capabilities – easy product configuration for sales reps, resellers and end-customers
Always valid product configuration
Although Tacton configurator looks like an ordinary questionnaire, there is more to it under the hood. For every selection made by the end user, the configurator validates all attribute constraints and automatically selects compatible modules and features. In this way, the configured product is always 100% correct and valid. The user is never led into configuration “dead ends”, being asked to go back X steps to change a selection.
Conflict Resolution
Although the configurator makes implicit selections on its own, based on the constraints, it does respect any selections explicitly made by the end user. If two explicit user selections are in conflict, Tacton CPQ product configurator automatically presents a conflict resolution and alternatives to the end user. With Tacton CPQ it is impossible to make mistakes.
Instant Sales BOM and pricing
Instant updates of the sales Bill-of-Material, customer net prices and product visualization after every user configuration selection, makes the user understand the technical and commercial consequences of her choices. And if your sales Bill-of-Material is extensive, yes, we do support multi-leveled BOM.
Upsell accessories effectively
Adding accessories and options to a configured product increases the value of a deal. With Tacton CPQ’s Options Management, you empower the sales rep with various ways to upsell and at the same time adding extra value for the customer – directly in the configurator. Leveraging Tacton’s smart configuration technologies, only add-ons that are compatible with the configured product are selectable, effectively avoiding selling incompatible solutions. If you are offering extensive catalogs of accessories – perhaps from third parties – Tacton CPQ’s Module Variant Catalog will do the job.
Boost the customer experience with Product Comparison
Comparing alternative products is an effective way empower customer’s investment decisions and shorten sales cycles. With Tacton CPQ comparison functionality you can put complex configured products side by side to better understand how they differ or overlap. Both in terms of configurator selections, sales Bill-of-Material as well as pricing. You can compare individual configurations or full quotes with multiple line-items. Improve customer conversion with Tacton CPQ product comparison.
Seamless conversion between Units of Measure
If you are selling on a global market, you know the importance of converting between units of measure across markets, for instance Metric versus Imperial. Many industries are also using multiple units of measures. With buyers and sellers preferring different units of measures, seamless conversion between them is a must to avoid costly errors and make your quotes more compelling to your local customers.
Mass Configuration Management
Some of our customers oftentimes sell hundreds of individually configurable products in one and the same opportunity, e.g. pumps or valves for a complete pulp or chemical processing plant. In these cases, Tacton CPQ’s Mass Update and Mass Import saves a lot of time, by handling a batch of configured products in one go without having to open them one-by-one.
Line item management
Empower your sales reps to build offerings in flexible ways, to win more deals faster. Copy and import successful quotes and configured products into new deals. Offer alternative line items and configured products in the same quote. Sort and create hierarchies in quotes with many line items. Mix configurable products and pick-to-order products in the same quote. Save successful configurations as starting points for future deals, and share those templates with sales colleagues.
See Tacton's configurator in action
Watch our product experts show Tacton’s configurator capabilities.
The results of Tacton CPQ*
*Data from manufacturers using Tacton CPQ
Manufacturers Trust Tacton
“Never before, have we had such control over our data […] because now we have access to the data for every sale that we make.”
“We definitely generate quotes much quicker today than before”
Discover how Topsoe uses Tacton CPQ to drive their quoting process