Enable Configure-to-Order (CTO) with Partial Engineer-to-Order (ETO)
Ensure manufacturers can migrate to a CTO business model while still supporting partial customization, so they can capture the efficiency and cost benefits of CTO without losing the ability to meet customer-specific demands.
By establishing this foundation, Configit enables manufacturers to:
✓ Manage options, modules, and exceptions in a shared product model
✓ Enable scalable and faster configuration
✓ Reduce complexity and improve time-to-market
Overview
What You Achieve with CTO and Partial ETO
Business Outcomes
Outcomes from Enabling CTO with partial ETO
Reduction in engineering costs when transitioning to CTO
ROI improvement reported by manufacturers making the shift
Faster time to market
for configurable products
Faster
quoting speed
The Challenge
Key Challenges in Managing Customizable Products with a Pure ETO Approach
Explosion in Product Variants
For manufacturers offering many product variants, each new customization request often triggers a “clone-and-own” process where an existing variant is copied and modified. Over time, this creates a proliferation of nearly identical or duplicate variants, driving up inventory, handling, and portfolio management costs.
Long Delivery Times, High Costs, and Inability to Scale
Manufacturers relying on ETO must use highly skilled engineers to architect solutions in an iterative customer negotiation process. This work is time-consuming and expensive. Because expert engineering effort cannot be reused efficiently, growth becomes difficult to scale.
Customization Demands Will Always Be There
Even manufacturers adopting CTO still encounter customer requests that require alterations to existing modules or options. The companies that can address these efficiently gain a significant competitive advantage.
Dependence on Employee Knowledge and Manual Processes
Many organizations rely on experienced employees to interpret requirements, resolve conflicts, and manually translate customer needs into feasible solutions. This creates risk, slows onboarding, and becomes more problematic as experienced staff retire.
Disconnected Product Data and Configuration Logic
Configuration is often performed across multiple systems and formats. Without a shared source of truth, information must be reinterpreted repeatedly across sales, engineering, manufacturing, and service, increasing errors and delays.
Get Started
Address the Most Critical Business Capability First
Challenge
Relying on experienced employees and manual, document-driven processes creates risks, errors, and delays, especially as experienced staff retire.
Solution
Configit Ace® captures cross-functional employee knowledge as rules in a shared product model, enabling automation and faster training of new hires.
Impact
Ability to handle more products with the same resources, with up to 90% less effort.
Challenge
Meeting customization needs with product variants can create enormous portfolios, making it difficult to find the right variant and increasing the risk of duplicates.
Solution
Gain a full overview of variants, identify duplicates, and quickly find those that meet specific requirements for both internal and external sales configuration with Configit Ace®.
Impact
Up to 30% reduction in time-to-market through faster responses to customer requests and higher efficiency.
Challenge
Serving customization demand through variants leads to portfolio explosion, operational complexity, and unnecessary inventory costs.
Solution
Configit Ace® allows to move from product finders and static variants to configurable products, while managing what is offered based on inventory and manufacturing realities.
Impact
Up to 10% reduction in inventory levels.
Challenge
Configuration is performed at multiple points in the manufacturing lifecycle, but in different systems and formats that require manual interpretation.
Solution
Configit Ace® establishes a common shared source of truth that supports end-to-end configuration of technical and non-technical options and rules.
Impact
Up to 95% reduction in product modeling time.
Challenge
Migrating to CTO is difficult because all options and rules must be captured and synchronized, while some partial ETO capability may still be required.
Solution
Configit Ace® empowers teams to build a shared product model that captures options, rules, and modular architectures while also supporting partial ETO where needed.
Impact
Up to 80% faster sales configuration and faster time-to-market, moving from months to weeks.
Ready to Address These Challenges?
Our Approach
How Configit Enables CTO with Partial ETO
Configit enables CTO with partial ETO through a Configuration Lifecycle Management (CLM) approach, creating a governed source of truth for options, rules, and modular product architectures across the enterprise.
With Configit Ace® and Virtual Tabulation®, manufacturers can validate complex combinations, reuse modules, and synchronize configuration logic across PLM, ERP, CPQ, and service. The result is a scalable CTO model that standardizes configurable products while preserving flexibility for partial ETO.
Customer Story
Vestas Aligned Product Data Across Enterprise Systems
Vestas faced challenges scaling to meet customer demand, resulting in slow time-to-market, low utilization of product features, and a high risk of configuration errors. Configit helped Vestas migrate toward CTO while still supporting ETO where needed.
The key benefits to us were efficiency, and based on the Configit solution were able to make a sales configuration in just 5 minutes, instead of 60.
Henry Farrell, Head of Digital Commercial – Digital Solutions Organization, Vestas
BOMs Validated
for introducing new products
into the configurator
Reduction in Time
for creating sales configurations,
from 60 to 5 minutes
Implementation
Start Small.
Scale Across the Enterprise.
No matter your specific challenge or focus, we recommend an agile, iterative approach that starts with addressing specific challenges that can deliver value quickly.
We then build on this foundation to extend the scope and value that a CLM approach delivers.
Talk to an Expert
We’ll review your system landscape, identify the highest-impact challenge to address first, and outline the fastest path to measurable value.