Stop treating CPQ states and PLM states as separate systems

It is common to see organizations describe their process as two parallel state machines: one inside CPQ, one inside PLM, loosely synchronized. That framing is the problem.

In practice there is one lifecycle: RFP/RFQ through As-Quoted, As-Accepted, As-Designed, As-Planned, As-Built and As-Maintained. What changes along the way is which system of record owns the master data at that point, not the fact that it is a single continuous chain.

Once an organization adopts the single-chain view, the integration questions get much simpler: not 'how do we sync two systems' but 'where exactly does ownership hand off, and what has to be true at each seam.'