CPQ
Profit from more orders
CPQ FOR MANUFACTURING
SIMPLIFY COMPLEX SALES AND CONFIGURATION
CPQ helps manufacturing companies configure complex products, create accurate quotes, and connect sales, engineering, and production. The result is a faster, more reliable, and more scalable sales process.
Tacton is a leading CPQ platform built specifically for manufacturers, and Scandinavian Digital is an official Tacton Sales and Services Partner.
What is CPQ?
CPQ stands for Configure, Price, Quote. It is software that lets a salesperson put together a valid version of a complex product, price it correctly and produce a quote, without having to ask engineering whether the combination is possible and what it costs.
For manufacturers of configurable products, that last part is the whole point. The bottleneck in a technical sale is rarely writing the quote. It is waiting for someone in engineering to confirm that what the customer asked for can actually be built.
What a CPQ system holds:
- The rules for which options can be combined, and which cannot
- The pricing logic, including cost, margin, discount and approval limits
- The connection to CRM and ERP, and in engineering-driven companies to CAD
- The quote document itself, generated rather than assembled by hand
Variant management, the problem CPQ actually solves
Most manufacturers do not have one product. They have a product family that can be configured in more ways than anyone has counted.
A machine with twelve options, each with four choices, has more than sixteen million theoretical combinations. Only a fraction of them are valid, and the knowledge of which ones usually sits with a handful of experienced people, in a spreadsheet nobody maintains, and in a set of rules that were never written down.
That is a variant management problem, and it shows up long before anyone mentions software:
- Sales quotes something that cannot be built, and engineering has to walk it back
- Two salespeople quote the same configuration at different prices
- The option list keeps growing, because adding a variant is easier than deciding whether it belongs
- Nobody can say which variants actually sell
CPQ is where variant knowledge gets written down. The rules stop being tribal knowledge and become a model: this option requires that one, this combination is not allowed below that capacity, this material is only valid within these dimensions. Once the rules exist as a model, sales, engineering and production can all use the same ones, and they can be maintained in one place instead of five.
This is also why variant management and modularisation belong together. A product that has been modularised, with defined building blocks and clean interfaces, is far easier to model than one where every variant is a special case.
The six value areas
The six value areas highlight where CPQ creates measurable impact across the sales process – from faster quoting and fewer errors to improved forecasting, shorter approval times, and better use of product knowledge.
Quote time
Reduce time need for quote with from days to minutes
Pricing errors
Reduce time need for quote with from days to minutes
Configuration error
Reduce time need for quote with from days to minutes
Approval time
Reduce approval time
Forecast
Increase forecast accuracy
Digitalisation
Ensure that your product knowledge
is captured and re-used
”Typically, an offer will take around 4 hours to complete. We believe we can do that in less than four minutes today”
Smarter CLM
Fewer errors
Cleaner data, consistent rules, and guided configuration reduce mistakes across sales and engineering. Teams spend less time fixing issues and more time moving projects forward.
Increased sales
Faster quoting, accurate configurations, and smoother collaboration help sales close deals quicker. Customers get clearer proposals, which boosts trust and conversions.
Lower costs
Automation cuts manual work, prevents rework, and shortens lead times. Companies save on engineering hours, operational inefficiencies, and costly production errors.
More efficient sales quotation process
Config2
Watch the CONFIG2 viewer in action!
For complex products, visualization is essential—not optional. It turns configuration into something clear and usable instead of technical and abstract. When sales, engineering, and customers can see and validate the product as they configure it, decisions are faster, mistakes are reduced, and the buying process becomes much smoother.
Why CPQ for manufacturing is not the same as sales CPQ
There are many CPQ products. Most were built for companies that sell subscriptions, licences or catalogue goods, where configuring means choosing a tier and a quantity.
Engineering-driven manufacturing is a different problem. The configuration has to respect physics, not just a price book.
| Sales-oriented CPQ | Manufacturing CPQ | |
|---|---|---|
| Configuration | Pick from a catalogue of predefined products | Constraint-based. The system solves for a valid combination |
| Rules | Commercial: bundles, tiers, discounts | Technical and commercial: capacities, materials, tolerances, regulations |
| Output | A price and a quote document | A price, a quote, and engineering output such as models, drawings and bills of materials |
| Connects to | CRM and billing | CRM, ERP, PLM and CAD |
| Where it struggles | Products that need engineering judgement | Nowhere in particular, but it takes more work to model |
Tacton is one of the platforms built for the second column, and Scandinavian Digital is an official Tacton Sales and Services Partner. We also build on our own configuration platform, CONFIG2. Which one fits depends on the product, on the systems already in place, and on how much of the order flow goes through engineering.
Whichever platform the configurator runs on, its value is decided by what happens after a configuration is accepted. That is a question of IT integration into PLM and ERP, and, for the part of the product you buy rather than make, of supplier integration.
How a quote actually gets made
1. The requirement comes in. A customer, a dealer or a salesperson states what the product has to do: capacity, dimensions, material, environment, regulations.
2. The configurator solves it. Instead of presenting a list and hoping the user picks a valid combination, a constraint-based configurator narrows the options as choices are made, so an invalid configuration cannot be built in the first place.
3. Pricing is applied. Cost, margin, discount rules and approval limits come from the same model, so two salespeople quoting the same thing arrive at the same number.
4. The quote is generated. The document assembles itself from the configuration, with the right drawings, specifications and terms.
In engineering-driven companies there is a fifth step, and it is the one that changes the economics: the same configuration drives design automation, which produces the 3D models, 2D drawings and bills of materials that production needs. Our demo library shows what that looks like in practice.
That is how a quoting process goes from hours to minutes. As Flemming Bille, CEO of BarkerBille, put it after their implementation: “Typically, an offer will take around 4 hours to complete. We believe we can do that in less than four minutes today.”
CPQ, frequently asked questions
Configure, Price, Quote. The three steps a technical sale has to get through before an order exists: establishing a valid configuration, arriving at a correct price, and producing a quote the customer can act on.
A configurator makes sure the specification is valid. CPQ adds everything that turns a valid specification into a sellable quote: pricing, discounting, approval rules and the quote document. Most CPQ systems contain a configurator, but not every configurator is a CPQ system.
It depends on where the time goes. If quoting is the bottleneck and engineering keeps getting pulled into sales to answer whether something can be built, CPQ comes first. If quotes go out fine but order execution drowns in drawings and bills of materials, design automation comes first. In practice the same product model feeds both, so work done for one is rarely wasted on the other.
The software is not the long part. Mapping the product rules is. A single, well-understood product family can be live in weeks. A full portfolio, with pricing, approvals and ERP integration, is measured in months. Companies that have already modularised their products move considerably faster.
Yes, and it should. A CPQ system that does not write into ERP just moves the manual work one step further down the line. Integration into CRM, ERP and, where relevant, PLM and CAD is normally part of the project rather than something that follows it.
The six value areas above are where the effect shows up: quote time, pricing errors, configuration errors, approval time, forecasting and digitalisation. The size depends entirely on how much of the quoting process runs through engineering today. BarkerBille went from roughly four hours per offer to under four minutes.
Integrations
