Swift CPQ - a cpq.se customer story

Swift Lifts manufactures home elevators — quiet, safe lifts designed to fit any interior style, for private homes and villas.

Our customers range from elderly people with an immediate need to move easier between floors — all the way to modern families that just want home luxury and home comfort.

Today Swift is geographically represented in Asia, meaning China, Thailand and Malaysia. Swift also sell to the Middle East and in Europe.

We mostly work with distributors but we also work with direct sales, says John Löwbäck — founder and CSO of Swift Lifts.

What makes the elevator business complex?

There are a lot of regulations in the elevator business. There are European regulations when the elevator is sold within EU and there are also local building and safety regulations.

— Just looking at the product, I would say that our product is complicated, because there are so many combinations. If you add color, travel height and doors and all that, it quickly adds up to billions of combinations.

The challenge with product complexity is obvious when it comes to internal processes — keeping track of materials, assemblies and ever-changing requirements.

— It's a challenge for the customer to understand what they are buying and to understand the prices. Here I think the configurator and the CPQ is essential. It would be impossible to present what we're selling and what it looks like without the quotes produced by CPQ.

One challenge is that homeowners specify what they want and what the house looks like, and then the factory assembles and puts the parts together.

— It's not until the product arrives on-site that the product is put together. It's at that point we confirm that everything worked — from the beginning, through the factory and to the delivery.

— Without a configurator it would be too complicated. The system keeps track of what was ordered in the beginning and keeps track that the same thing is what the customer sees installed six months later.

Is it possible to sell an elevator without a configurator?

John has seen what selling elevators looks like without a configurator — a big order-taking department, people receiving emails, phone calls and PDF templates, trying to convert that into quotes. It quickly adds up to a lot of people.

On a global market, that dependence on sales staff makes it hard to serve customers well — when someone wants a quote at 6pm, there's no one answering.

— Previously we also did so many stupid mistakes. Left became right, colors were not matching up and the measurements were wrong.

Launching new features was also difficult without a configurator.

— Even though you launch this new feature, no one has it in their PDF templates. So I think the configurator just facilitates in all sorts of aspects.

Why did you select Tacton CPQ as the configurator?

- Our expert when it comes to Bill of materials and drawings seldom says that anything is good or powerful. So when he said "OK this is powerful" then everyone realized – OK this is powerful!

- That’s why I think Tacton was the natural choice from day one.

Who uses Tacton CPQ?

Today Tacton CPQ is mostly used by the distributors of Swift Lifts.

- I think overall the users are very happy. I don’t think we have had any kind of complaint.

Internally at Swift there are also a lot of people using the CPQ system. The sales team makes preliminary quotes for new distributors in new countries in new markets. The system is also used to forecast sales and production.

- We can go through quotes and we quickly see trends when we make analysis. Finance is also using CPQ to track prices, costs and margins.

Swift Lifts also uses the system to simulate different kinds of adjustments to the price model when maintaining and updating the product.

- There is definitely more potential in how CPQ will be used in the future.

How has CPQ improved things for distributors?

Within Tacton CPQ there are different roles defined for the users, which makes the system easy to use for new people.

- This makes it even more simple for the distributors to use CPQ for the whole of their workforce to work with sales.

- Back in the days of PDF-templates and things. This was tricky. This was hard. You needed a lot of experience and if you made any mistake it could be very costly.

With the smaller distributors it was always the founder or the sales manager who was the only person able to create quotes.

- But now with the CPQ system in place it’s very simple to use. With Tacton CPQ our distributors can provide way better service to their end customers.

It's very common that customers want to change and update quotes.

- This happens all the time – and with CPQ it just works.

How did quoting volumes change?

- Our quoting volume and speed of creating quotes definitely improved. I’m not sure we have any figures, because it’s so obvious! There are definitely in total more quotes. On top of that we get quotes without any mistakes!

Before CPQ, a lot of time was spent on each quote.

- And then the customer for sure wanted to change something and then it took another day or two.

- Now we can make revisions in the matter of minutes. So I think the whole relationship with the distributors, and by consequence the end customer, is really super-quick.

About the project

This project was started, executed and completed during the pandemic. Everything was done with online meetings, online workshops and online training. The first time we at cpq.se actually met the customer was when the system was already live selling elevators.

The cpq.se team is presented below. In addition, we got great support from Petter, Anders, Arvid and John at Swift Lifts. All quotes above originate from the video with John.

This project also included an integration with Dynamaker, a dynamic online CAD visualization used both during configuration and when the quote document is generated. Read more about Dynamaker on our blog. We got excellent support from Kristofer and Jaime.