Speaker

Henrik Hulgaard, PhD, VP Product Management and Co-founder, Configit

Title

Profitable Customization at Scale with CTO and Partial ETO

Customization is now the norm for complex manufacturers, but it stretches teams, systems, and margins. Many manufacturers have adopted a Make-to-Stock product variant strategy but see the variant count explode as complexity increases leading to duplicates, repeated work, and lack of manageable overview.

Others rely on an Engineer-to-Order (ETO) strategy and gain flexibility, but at the cost of heavy engineering involvement, high operational complexity, and difficult-to-manage delivery commitments. In both cases, configuration knowledge becomes fragmented across engineering, sales, and operations.

Adopting a CLM approach enables these manufacturers to transition to a Configure-to-Order strategy based on modularized architectures but supporting customized modules. This CTO with partial ETO strategy supports the reality that manufacturers face today in a scalable and profitable way.

In this talk, Henrik Hulgaard, Configit VP Product Management, will explain the difference between Make-to-Stock, ETO and CTO and how a CLM approach can support customers at each step of their transition to CTO with partial ETO. Henrik will show the benefits that our customers have achieved by making this transition today and how this provides the foundation for digital threads and Agentic AI in the future.

Outcomes at a glance:

• CTO bridges standard products and ETO
• CLM turns product knowledge into reusable assets
• AI accelerates the CTO journey