Oracle CPQ vs. Tacton Design Automation

I think CPQ had worked so well for our company because of the widespread nature of our associates and tracking orders that were being placed in multiple time zones. My team specifically needed a way of analyzing these orders to track our progress in real time and sort out any supply orders before they became an issue. If you are in a centralized location with a smaller team then this may not yield much use to you.

Incentivized

Tacton works best with products that always look the same and use a large number of the same shaped parts, but those parts are often a custom size. Tacton can also work extremely well with products with parts that don't need to be resized, but just have different options of parts.

Incentivized

• Leveraged automation to minimize headcount costs despite 10% year-over-year business growth, and enabled staff to focus on more strategic tasks.
• Established a flexible CPQ system that scales on demand to easily accommodate the company’s multiple global locations.
• Improved customer relations by reducing configuration time and allowing sales more time to meet with customers and close orders.

Incentivized

• Tacton has a non-linear solver, meaning it can solve lots of equations without them being is a particular order. This enables the software to be incredibly flexible.
• Tacton has a great interface to set up configurators for people to use. No knowledge of programming languages is required. The configurator uses equations similar to Excel equations to control what the users options are.
• Tacton has the ability to easily add lists of data like product lists, beam or pipe sizes that because available for user selections or for calculations.
• The Tacton configurator also automatically builds the user interface as you set up user inputs making it much easier to set up then competitor software.

Incentivized

• Advanced coding for some areas in config and pricing engine are written in BML. This Java-like code may be a bit tricky for someone trying to write very advanced configuration rules or advanced pricing.
• The flagship system needs to have an easier way to enter in pricing. In the BMX version, pricing is handled through multiple matricies, but in the flagship it is compiled into one ugly rule.
• Customization. Other software comes with tools to help customize the "look and feel" quickly. To get a re-vamped look on the flagship product, you'll need a CSS expert.

• Layout mode is probably the most lacking aspect of the software (within Tacon Design Automation Engineer). Something so powerful as having modular parts should be more heavily supported. Although, I've heard Tacton is focusing on updating this with better functionality.
• The constraint editor does not display complex/lengthy constraints very well. I end up using Excel to visually break out in cells the different aspects of the constraint.

Incentivized

So far it is all good with BigMachines, looking for new features since Oracle acquisition has created a lot of expectations. We have outlined our limitations (out of box functionality) in our periodic customer successor advice meetings for a while, hope we get a resolution soon. Also, the BigMachines user license fee has increased a lot in the last three years.

Incentivized

While they have a decent administrator interface (relative to other apps), the part that is unintuitive is the printer friendly output. I view this is as the meat and potatoes. They are very constrained on these abilities. To make a font change is really cumbersome. There is no content management protocol to protocol. This kills us.

Other than one day two years ago and an hour or two a few times since then due to data center outages, it has been very reliable

It depends upon the day however there are so many failure points with online services, including our internet service, that this is probably closer to 9 with the latest version

Some specific support personal was good and fixed some problems fast using proper solutions. But when one of them went to sleep when we had critical issues and they do unreported commits to our production environment which caused issues and they were hiding it?? you can not give more than a two (maybe even that is too much). They also failed to add a feature for us which also bring the grade down.

They have pretty good training. Our business analysts have been able to go to entry and advanced level training. They have a train the trainer model. Our business analyst attended training, then trained the rest of our staff.

Like with any implementation go into it with a clear and realistic plan for getting the implementation completed and it will go much smoother. BigMachines has a clear process and an excellent staff fort getting an implementation completed we just needed to follow more of it instead of creating our own roadblocks

We debated a few different options, including a home-grown custom program, uCommerce, and just using only Oracle Commerce Cloud. Since we had already decided to use Oracle Commerce Cloud over uCommerce, the integrations available between OCC, Oracle's ERP system, and Oracle CPQ definitely seemed like the easiest option with the greatest benefits. However, the cost/benefit of Oracle CPQ was more apparent when we were ready to launch more complex configurations across all of our product groups.

Incentivized

My company initially purchased DriveWorks and I was trained. However, a year later we found Tacton Design Automation. Based on the same points mentioned in this review we left DriveWorks for Tacton. Briefly those points are: Tacton, at the time, was the only design automation software integrated (meaning the interface for programming and running Tacton) within SOLIDWORKS; GUI creation is streamlined; automatic error handling is huge; layout mode; multi-unit support.

Incentivized

• Sales Operations or IT would have a better understanding of the license user costs and ROI. I do know that Sales has experienced frustrations in the the lead gen-to-close process and have experienced delays with some deals. In other instances, the software has worked fine. I would love to see an analysis on how our lead-conversion rate, sales cycles, and proposal volume stacks up.

Incentivized

• Time to produce submittals went from 1-2 weeks down to a couple of days. Then, once approved, normally to produce the fabrication drawings (70+ unique parts) it would take from 4-6 weeks. We can get it down to as little as a few days.

Incentivized