Swift Lifts: From an Order-Taking Department to a Response Time of Zero

The company

Swift Lifts makes quiet, design-first home elevators, sold across Asia, the Middle East and Europe. It is a product with billions of possible combinations of colours, doors and travel heights, wrapped in EU and local safety regulations. Today the company's distributors quote all of it themselves in Tacton CPQ.

The problem: an order-taking department

Before CPQ, selling an elevator meant an order-taking department: people converting emails, phone calls and PDF templates into quotes by hand. It was expensive and slow, and unavailable exactly when a customer in another timezone wanted an answer at 6 pm. Costly mistakes crept in: left became right, colours did not match, measurements were wrong. And every new product feature launched into PDF templates that nobody had remembered to update.

Why Tacton CPQ

Swift's bill-of-materials expert is not a man given to enthusiasm. His verdict, "OK, this is powerful," settled the vendor selection on the spot. What sold him is the same thing we describe in our guide to CPQ configurators: one governed model that enforces the engineering and compliance rules, instead of a spreadsheet that will happily let you build something that cannot be installed.

The project: real-time CAD, delivered remotely

What makes Swift's setup unusual is that the customer sees the elevator while it is being configured. Dynamaker generates the CAD drawing in real time, during configuration and again inside the quote document. For a product bought on design as much as function, that drawing is the difference between describing an elevator and showing one. And because the configuration is the single source of truth, the elevator that arrives on-site six months later is the one in the drawing. Like HMF's, Swift's configurator was live and selling before the cpq.se team ever met the company in person; the whole implementation ran online.

The results

Distributors of any size now quote independently. Where quoting used to be the founder's or sales manager's job, the whole workforce sells. Revisions happen in minutes, while the customer is still in the conversation. The people who used to take orders now do work that grows the company: sales, marketing and technical support. The rest of the business runs on the same model, with sales forecasting, finance tracking margins, and price-model simulation before product updates. It is the self-service outcome our customer HMF Cranes got on a truck-mounted crane, applied here to a highly visual, safety-regulated product. It is also the opposite of the failure mode we describe in 9 mistakes to avoid when implementing CPQ: one governed model that every market draws from, not a bigger spreadsheet.

What's next

Swift's vision is for distributors to retire their own systems because CPQ covers everything they need, and then to connect end customers directly to the configurator. "There's some untapped potential here." You can see it from the customer's side already: try the Swift Lifts configurator on their website.