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Visit to Chicago for Tacton CPQ Training

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Steve Miller, C2 Solution Architect, and I recently attended Tacton training in their new office space in downtown Chicago. Tacton, headquartered in Sweden, is a relatively new entrant into the US market for Configure Price Quote (CPQ) solutions. With the drive for C2’s B2B customers to start selling their configure-to-order or engineer-to-order products online, CPQ solutions such as Tacton CPQ are emerging to streamline and support their sales processes.

The training was led by Tacton’s Patrik Knudsen, who implemented Tacton for several clients and had a wealth of knowledge to share. During the course of a challenging three days, we spent time understanding Tacton’s configurator solution and its web-based CPQ solution and explored some of its APIs to understand its integration capabilities. The training was very hands-on and we spent the bulk of the time doing exercises utilizing a sandbox environment that was based on real-life implementation scenarios.

If you have some idea of what CPQ is but not how it may affect your organization, there are some important things to consider:

– Tacton (and many other CPQs) is designed around having your internal account reps configure a quote, complete with options and pricing on behalf of the end customer, rather than a customer login/self-configuration.

– Tacton has recently implemented some new functionality around an end customer view of the account and quotes.

– Tacton CPQ is hosted in the cloud, so you won’t need to set up expensive infrastructure to use it, but you will need to have it configured for your application. For this there are two options: Put your staff through Tacton CPQ configuration training, or retain the services of a company who has completed the training.

– You may be wondering how much time Tacton CPQ projects usually take. The answer is three to six months for the initial development, followed by an on-going maintenance period as you will want to add features and adjust the behavior of the system as you learn to use it.

As is expected for an enterprise solution, Tacton CPQ supports different operational roles for order taking, pricing, reporting, and administration. It’s impressive how configurable the CPQ solutions are, and you would want somebody fairly technical to make the best use of that. And as with most well-designed systems, Tacton supports the custom development and integration to backend systems using the Tacton Web API. Their CPQ development environment came with very good reference material, and Tacton provides some excellent training options.

In addition to the training, we had some great weather and were able to get out an enjoy Chicago’s restaurant scene, including one of their many great steakhouses, an old-school hip-hop and Ramen place and an Italian restaurant.

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