Transforming Supply Chain Management with CPQ Analytics at Bromma

Bromma lifts the most standardized object in world trade, the shipping container, with heavily customized machines. Around 30 spreader models, roughly 25,000 units delivered, equipment in 99 of the world's top 100 ports, and every crane interface, ladder and climate package a little different. Since Bromma went full scope in 2018, not a single machine has been sold outside Tacton CPQ (internally the system is still called Bromma Select, a name that has survived since the first TCsite implementation in 2012).

That makes Bromma's quote data unusually valuable, and at the Tacton Summit in October 2024 the company showed what it does with it. Joakim Heijbel, who heads digitalization, information management and sustainability at Bromma, presented together with Ingemar Lindström, then Bromma's digital transformation lead and now a CPQ consultant here at cpq.se. The full video is at the end of this post, and the host's framing rang true to us: analytics and AI are the two things Tacton customers ask about most.

How Bromma gets Tacton CPQ data into BigQuery

The architecture is deliberately boring. A small containerized job runs in Google Cloud, authenticates against Tacton CPQ with OAuth, and asks for every object updated since the last run: accounts, opportunities, solutions, configured products, bills of materials, and the parameters behind them (every question the configurator asked, and whether the user answered it). The result lands in BigQuery. Bromma chose a six-hour schedule over event triggers, and changing that cadence is a single setting.

From there, insight reaches the business in three layers: curated Looker Studio dashboards for managers, Connected Sheets for people who want to pivot the data themselves in a familiar spreadsheet, and raw SQL against BigQuery for one-off questions. Access control rides on the Google accounts everyone already has. If you want the technical walkthrough, we wrote one in From BigQuery to Looker Studio: visualizing Tacton CPQ data with the Google BI stack.

Before this setup, the same analysis meant a custom TCsite plugin, exports, and cutting and pasting into one giant Excel sheet. Now the database "just keeps giving us the data," as Ingemar put it on stage.

Forecasting long lead-time components before orders land

This is the supply chain use case in the title, and the one we find most interesting. Certain components have long supplier lead times, and historically Bromma's sourcing team only learned what to buy when an order was booked. In the worst case, supplier lead time became Bromma's lead time.

Now Bromma reads the configured options sitting in open quotes and weighs them by opportunity probability from Salesforce. Sourcing gets a forward view of which long lead-time components are likely to be needed, and can order proactively. That shortens delivery times for customers, and it has a softer benefit Ingemar was honest about: nobody has to pick up the phone and yell at a supplier anymore. Forecasts make for better supplier relationships than emergencies do.

The use case is still a pilot for a reason worth learning from: it only works where an option maps cleanly to a component. Where Bromma's sales bill of materials does not go deep enough, they are enriching the configuration models for exactly those components rather than exploding the full manufacturing BOM into CPQ. Sensible scope control.

Tracking a new product rollout in real time

Bromma recently launched its sixth-generation control system, and the responsible product manager now has a live dashboard: is the new system being quoted, where does quoting convert to orders, and in which regions or segments is it stalling so he can call the sales team and ask why. Pricing gets sanity-checked the same way, model by model.

Two details we liked: the dashboard shows where the first units will be delivered, so the product manager can keep a special eye on early customers, and it flags when a quirky low-volume model sells, so R&D knows to prioritize software work before delivery. In the old TCsite-and-Excel world this tracking would have meant updating a spreadsheet daily by hand.

Eco portfolio reporting straight from the configuration

Bromma classifies part of its portfolio as eco, aligned with the EU taxonomy for sustainable activities, and as part of Kalmar (listed in Helsinki) it reports eco portfolio sales in public market disclosures. Here is the CPQ twist: eco status is not fixed per model. A single option, such as an energy-efficiency package, can move a configured machine into the eco portfolio. You need the configuration, not the price list, to classify a sale.

With CPQ data in BigQuery, Bromma tracks eco sales daily, forecasts them, and analyzes what premium customers actually pay for eco variants. The previous process was handmade in Excel with, in their own words, so-so quality. If this angle interests you, we have written more about how CPQ supports the transition to green alternatives.

The questions Bromma asks its quote data

Beyond the three headline use cases, the standing questions are ones any manufacturer with a mature CPQ should be asking:

• Which products and options drive the highest margins?
• Which options are frequently quoted but rarely ordered, and is that a pricing problem?
• Which engineer-to-order requests recur so often they should become standard options?
• Are customers in specific product lines requesting the same customizations?
• Which configurator questions are never actively answered, and can the UI be simplified by removing them?
• Which customers, products or regions generate the most order amendments?

That last one is telling: discounting, price lists, option-level sales history and the order amendment process live only in CPQ, not in SAP or Salesforce. If you are deciding what to measure first, start with the eight KPIs we recommend for CPQ.

Watch the Bromma presentation

The full session from the Tacton Summit is about 50 minutes including a lively Q&A that covers win/loss analysis, GDPR, why the BOM depth matters, and Bromma's plan to start "chatting with the data" with an LLM on top of BigQuery. Joakim closes with the same verdict as Ingemar: limited effort, and ad hoc analysis "in a completely different way than before."

Get the same analytics on your Tacton CPQ

The setup behind this talk was designed in collaboration with Bromma, cpq.se and three other Tacton customers. The project team was Patrik Skjelfoss, Ingemar Lindström and Muntazir Mehdi: Patrik and Muntazir delivered the solution from the cpq.se side, while Ingemar drove it at Bromma as digital transformation lead and co-presented it on stage. He has since joined cpq.se, so the person who ran this at Bromma now sits on our side of the table.

Because the groundwork is done, we offer it as a fixed-price setup for any Tacton CPQ customer, typically up and running within a month. If you are already live on Tacton CPQ and not collecting this data, Ingemar's advice above stands. Book a 30-minute meeting and we will show you live dashboards and scope it against your setup. Earlier in your CPQ journey? Start with our guide to CPQ for manufacturing.

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