Many different industries rely on configure-to-order (CTO) or engineer-to-order (ETO) strategies to profitably deliver products to their customers. Product companies want to mass customize their way to markets of one. Product configurators have long addressed this problem, some technical and some targeted toward business users. Both configuration skills and costing accuracy are essential to make it work. But, as in other disciplines, many of these solutions are designed for experts.

Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) solutions take this one step further, using engineering and enterprise data to quickly develop profitable bids and solutions to customers’ problems. As part of our research on this topic, CIMdata identified over 70 firms with CPQ offerings that are “getting to CPQ” from different directions. The figure below illustrates the types of firms offering CPQ solutions.

Types of firms offering CPQ solutions
(Courtesy of CIMdata)

Configuration management (CM) specialists like Tacton and Configit have offerings in this space. Many are niche players in specific industries, like wood products or communications services for example, as well as manufacturing-specific applications. A number of offerings use commercial customer relationship management (CRM) solutions such as Salesforce.com or Sugar CRM as a “platform” for CPQ solution development. There are others built as part of enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions. And, finally, many of the leading PLM solution and service providers have CPQ offerings, including Accenture, Autodesk, Oracle, and SAP.

To learn more about the CPQ market, including the drivers for industrial adoption, some of the leading providers, and how CIMdata views the business opportunity for the PLM Economy, join us for one of our global PLM Market & Industry Forum events, which this year will take place in Ann Arbor MI on March 30; Stuttgart, Germany on April 6; Bangalore, India on April 10; Beijing China on April 14, and Tokyo, Japan on April 19.

Best wishes,

Stan