The manufacturing industry accounts for about 20% of the global climate impact, so we want to be part of changing this.
As a software company with four offices in Europe and North America we have an environmental impact mainly caused by business travels and use of IT and office utilities by our over 200 employees. The estimate of our total organizational climate footprint shows that Tacton´s opportunity to contribute to a sustainable society lies with the adoption of our CPQ by our customers within the manufacturing industry.
The intersection of responsibilities by manufacturers’ sustainability, as well as digitalization or CPQ experts, is where the potential lies. We started in 2022 to discover how we can reach those and make them cooperate to reach their sustainability goals.
Traditionally, CPQ has been utilized as a sales tool that connects your sales process from configuration through product delivery, but there are some hidden benefits that are helping manufacturers achieve their sustainability goals.
Tacton CPQ enables anyone to configure the optimal solution based on sustainability product requirements. CPQ enables anyone to configure an optimized solution by automatically using sustainable materials, reducing wasteful components, and oversizing while ensuring operational energy consumption. Tacton is helping leading manufacturers reimagine their business models to meet the adapt to their environmental needs.
At Tacton we approach sustainability from three focused areas: Internal, Product, and Thought leadership. There´s also a foundational Governance structure ensuring streamlining of different focus areas related to resources and business strategy.
The internal work is focused on reducing the environmental impact of the organization, training on what sustainability is and creating a work environment where employees can thrive. Community outreach is also a part of this.
As regards to product, we see the untapped potential that integrating sustainability data on a product and even configuration level in our CPQ software can lead to. The first CPQ feature related to this is the Environmental Footprint Configuration, EFC.
Thought leadership is important since what we´ll bring to market is an industry´s first. The connection between complex manufactured products and their sustainability specifications, starting with the environment, is often not made in the same way as for B2C products. For B2C products eco-labels help to guide the purchasers. We aim to enable B2B customers to use environmental specifications as a choice point in purchasing and facilitate climate reporting by providing impact data covering the whole or part of the product’s life cycle.
Progress within the three focused areas is shared in the Governance meetings with leads for marketing, product development, and human resources, as well as regularly with the executive leadership team. The responsibility lies with CXOs for the overall progress.
*in Q1 2023.
In 2022 we hired a Sustainability manager to strengthen and guide our work. A high-level materiality analysis was made and a baseline climate footprint for our own operations was estimated to be about 650 tons CO2e. To align our understanding of what sustainability is tailored sustainability training was developed, and networks for Diversity and inclusion as well as the broader sustainability topic were formed. The opportunity in product development was researched, and in 2023 we launched capabilities to add products’ environmental features as part of CPQ. We’ll also continue with different thought leadership activities, building on the activities in 2022.