Tacton Rules!
January 25, 2018
Tacton Rules!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Tacton
At ClearStream Tacton is an important part of our product design process. We design clarifiers for water treatment. Every clarifier we sell has similar parts that look the same, but are different in size. I think of using Tacton a bit like configuring a computer on the Dell website, where you can choose the different components you want, and the software helps you pick parts that work together. Once the user chooses the options they want, Tacton can be used in different ways. As a sales configurator Tacton can perform complicated pricing and produce quotes for customers. We use the Tacton SolidWorks addin called TactonWorks to produce 3D CAD models in SolidWorks reducing weeks of work to around an hour. TactonWorks also creates all the drawings we need to fabricate our product.
- 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.
- Setting up a Tacton configuration can get very complicated, I usually end up with several pages in a binder or notebook of notes to track how a particular product was set up.
- The fact that I need to reference several pages of notes to keep track of what I am doing or especially to tell what I did several weeks later, makes me think that maybe Tacton could come up with a way to better organize things or show the user an overview of what they are building so they don't get lost in it.
- The payback period is fast on the software investment but is slower to cover the investment in labor to set up product configurations. Depending on how complicated your products are
- We look at payback period of our products and including learning the system and everything over the first year we average a .8 year payback on software and labor combined. Although some were much better around .3 years while some parts that were more complicated and done first with a steep learning curve were as much as a 4 year payback.
- One of the down sides of automating your business like this is that the software can only help you save time and money if you sell the products that have been configured in the system, so if you sell less of the products you set up than planned it can be a big waste.
- DriveWorks
Drive Works is the main competitor for the TactonWorks module of Tacton. We actually discovered DriveWorks and purchased it before we discovered Tacton and started to use it. Once we discovered Tacton we liked it so much better we dropped using DriveWorks and switched to Tacton. I think you could accomplish what you need to in DriveWorks, but it is easier to setup in Tacton and Tacton has alot of features that really can make your product configurators nice.