The point of manufacturing is to design and make a product then deliver the right product to the customer. Sometimes we just churn out a large quantity and hope they will sell. Sometimes we configure to order or “mass customize” products.
For example, I once had a job where I reported to the Vice President of product development for a manufacturing company. Two of us reported to him. The other guy headed the engineering teams for all of our standard products. I had a small team and we did special projects. One task was to help sales people go through complex specs and configure our product to meet the specs. My technology was a 4-column accounting ledger, pencil, and Singer adding machine.
I bet I made mistakes.
Frederic Laziou, CEO of Tacton, a Swedish company with a product in the CPQ space, just talked with me about what’s happening with his company and the technology.
CPQ stands for Configure Price Quote recognized by Gartner with Tacton firmly situated in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant in CPQ.
A SaaS company born in the cloud from a research institute in Sweden, Tacton used AI plus search research to become a product search engine. Among CPQ companies, Tacton is unique as a niche player in manufacturing with key domain knowledge in manufacturing.
CPQ would have made my job from the late 70s easier, more accurate, and better documented. Good stuff.
Laziou states Tacton has presence in Europe, Japan, and North America. There is a common thread—they cannot compete on price. Mass customization or individualizations helps companies compete.
The company was seeking to deepen its North American presence, niche player in these areas:
- Machinery
- Production lines
- Power Generation (Dresser/Siemens)
- Medical Technology (Siemens and GE)
- Heavy commercial vehicles
- Fluid and air flow
30-40% of that business is in the US. In order to sustain leadership, need to be closer to the customer and partners, therefore have US headquarters. It established an office in the Chicago area. Two additional reasons for the Chicago location include direct flights to Stockholm and a wealth of necessary talent in manufacturing, software, and sales and marketing.
Putting Tacton in context of Industry 4.0, it puts customer in the center of the customer’s digitization.
Laziou says that as more people are bringing consumer technology into the business context, Tacton developed AR to enhance customer engagement. Not to mention that AR addresses big pain point—errors in quotes.
To fuel the expansion and drive increased sales, the company is making a $12 million investment over the next three years to establish joint headquarters in Chicago
In conjunction with its expansion and investment in the U.S. market, Tacton is also announcing new capabilities in its cloud-based CPQ platform. The new features include augmented reality (AR)-powered visualization and expanded integration with Salesforce that makes it even easier for manufacturers to design, configure and sell complex products.
Founded in 1998, Tacton CPQ software and design automation solutions help the world’s largest manufacturers, such as Bosch, Siemens and Caterpillar to manage the complexities traditionally associated with producing customized and configured products that meet strict customer requirements.
For example, the Industrial Power division at Siemens uses Tacton’s sales configuration software to slash the time it takes to prepare price quotes and simplify product configuration of custom solutions. It used to take Siemens eight weeks to produce a custom quote for its gas turbine units, With Tacton’s CPQ, the sales team now produces the same quote in a matter of minutes, without requiring any help from product specialists.
“The beauty of the Tacton Configurator is that it will guide the sales representative and get the product configuration for an accurate price quote each time. It now takes us only five minutes to generate a complete budget offer including pricing. This saves us tremendous amounts of time and money,” said Siemens Senior Engineer CRM process & IT Development Jan Nilsson.
Tacton CPQ now includes visual product configuration, including real time, interactive 3D drag-and-drop functionality. Sales engineers can interact directly with a sophisticated configuration tool, powered by AR to visualize the configuration within the actual environment.
The new capabilities extend Tacton’s integration with Salesforce to boost sales with features including needs-based configuration. Salesforce Sales Cloud customers can now connect to the full power of Tacton CPQ leveraging its best-in-class AI-driven configurator for the manufacturing industry. Tacton CPQ for Salesforce features automated CAD drawing and engineer-to-order (ETO) processes with out-of-the-box integration to all leading CAD solutions, integration with SAP ERP and Variant Configurator (SAP LO-VC) and open APIs that enable full integration with the existing IT stack.
“We experienced significant customer adoption for Tacton CPQ solutions among European manufacturers over the last two years, making it the ideal time to meet a similar demand in the United States,” said Frederic Laziou, CEO of Tacton. “By continuing to add breakthrough enhancements like AR-powered visual configuration to our CPQ solution, we can drive even greater efficiency for manufacturers, making it even simpler and faster to sell complex products.”
Trackbacks/Pingbacks