Sales meets LCA: enriching Tacton’s CPQ software with product footprint data
Client
Now there’s increasing scrutiny on sustainability performance, manufacturing companies are facing a growing demand in sustainable products and an increasing pressure to be more transparent about their environmental impact. Because of this, sales departments require sustainability metrics when pricing and quoting highly configurable products. Life cycle assessment (LCA) opens up opportunities for this. Read on about how we worked with Tacton to provide their users with sustainability information during the sales process.
About
Tacton is a leading Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) software provider. Their software helps manufacturing companies to configure complex products efficiently, get instant price calculations, and quickly generate quotes, technology specs and more. Traditionally, CPQ software is used as a sales tool, but it can also help manufacturers reach their sustainability goals. Tacton CPQ wants to enable users to configure their optimal solution with sustainable materials, reducing wasteful components and oversizing.
Challenge
Based on interviews with customers, Tacton understands that manufacturers are at risk of losing revenue if they cannot provide environmental, social and governance (ESG) data as part of their quotes. Similarly, they see a potential increase in revenue if ESG data is included. They wanted to enrich Tacton CPQ with a functionality that helps users generate product-specific environmental impact data without too much additional work.
Solution
The gold standard approach for product-specific environmental impact data is doing a life cycle assessment for each individual configuration. Leveraging LCA usually requires manual work from experts, which takes several days for just one configuration. This makes reporting the environmental impact of products to regulatory organizations very time intensive. Using configuration-based environmental impact data in sales is almost prohibitively expensive.
Together with Tacton and environmental consultancy Miljögiraff (SimaPro partner and distributor in Sweden and Finland), we built an integration between SimaPro and Tacton CPQ that provides the environmental footprint of specific configurations. The LCA model, a generic model built in SimaPro, includes a library of potential components. The new solution, called Tacton CPQ Environmental Footprint Configuration, also uses the bill of materials (BoM) and selected usage parameters to calculate the footprint and provide instant and easy-to-understand environmental insights. Through the SimaPro API, users of Tacton CPQ can add the relevant components and usage parameters (e.g. average number of expected users). This information is added or modified in the LCA model to calculate the footprint of the configured product in real time.
Benefits
The integration of SimaPro within Tacton CPQ enables manufacturers to quickly and easily understand the environmental impact of configured products. The result includes comprehensive emissions data, spanning Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions. This allows them to quantify and optimize the environmental impact of their products throughout the product life cycle. From material selection and energy consumption during use to transportation and end-of-life disposal, businesses can now make environmentally conscious decisions enabled by readily available carbon emissions data for product configurations.
Now, manufacturers can report environmental impact of products to regulatory organizations and inform their prospects about how to choose the optimal product.
By leveraging capabilities in both Tacton CPQ and SimaPro, we can create dynamic and instant LCA estimates at the time of sales for millions of different product variants. This will drastically reduce the cost of LCA calculations and empower sales reps and customers to configure industrial equipment with minimal climate impact.
Patrik Östberg, VP Product Management at Tacton
Would you like to learn more about the Tacton Environmental Footprint Configuration? Check the in which the product teams of Tacton and PRé showcase this new capability and how it generates business value for B2B manufacturers.