Pricing Technology Transformation

From Excel grids to a real pricing engine.

We move distributors off offline spreadsheets and manual ERP keying onto a pricing system built for their business. Blueprint, vendor selection, build, UAT, ERP integration, downstream data feeds, and go-live—one team, start to finish.

See the Roadmap Book a Diagnostic

Price_Scenarios_FINAL_v7.xlsx Keyed by hand

SKUListTier 1Tier 2GP% 100482-1242.1039.9538.4021.4 100517-0628.75#REF!26.1018.9 100733-2461.0057.805.78— 100812-1235.4033.6032.2519.7

↓ Becomes ↓

Pricing Engine Live in ERP

Scenariomodeled

→

Approvalrouted

→

ERPposted

→

Channelspublished

Sound Familiar?

Your pricing strategy is only as good as the spreadsheet it lives in.

Most distributors didn't choose Excel as their pricing system—it just became one. Price changes get modeled in offline grids, emailed for approval, then keyed line by line into the ERP. It works, until the business outgrows it.

⌨️

Manual keying into the ERP

Analysts re-type approved prices into condition records by hand. Every keystroke is a chance for a margin-killing error.

🗂️

Version chaos

"FINAL_v7_updated.xlsx" lives on someone's desktop. Nobody is certain which grid is the source of truth.

✉️

Approvals by email

Price decisions are approved in inbox threads with no audit trail, no guardrails, and no visibility into who changed what.

⏳

Slow speed to market

A price move that should take a day takes weeks to model, approve, load, and verify—while competitors and suppliers keep moving.

🕳️

Invisible margin leakage

Keying errors, expired deals, and missed chargebacks quietly bleed margin, and nobody finds out until month-end—if ever.

🧮

Analysts doing data entry

Your most commercially sharp people spend their week maintaining grids instead of analyzing price, mix, and competitive position.

The fix isn't a better spreadsheet. It's a pricing system that models scenarios, routes approvals, and posts directly to your ERP—selected, built, tested, and launched by people who have run pricing inside a large distributor.

How We Get You There

End-to-End Roadmap

Seven phases. One accountable partner from blueprint to go-live.

Pricing transformations fail in the gaps—between the business and IT, between the ERP and the channels that depend on it, between "configured" and "actually used." We own the whole path, or step into the phase where you need us most.

Blueprint

Document how pricing actually works today, and design how it should work tomorrow.

Current-state process & spreadsheet inventory
Pricing architecture: tiers, programs, deals, breaks
Approval workflow & governance design
Business requirements & success metrics

Output: Future-state blueprint

Vendor Selection

An objective build-vs-buy decision, made against your requirements—not a sales demo.

Market scan & vendor shortlist
RFP creation and scripted demos
Weighted scoring & total cost of ownership
Contract & statement-of-work review support

Output: Selection recommendation

Build & Configure

Translate the blueprint into a working system—vendor-configured or custom-built.

Functional specs & configuration oversight
Scenario modeling, GP bridge & approval logic
Data migration from legacy grids
Business-side liaison to the build team

Output: Configured solution

User Acceptance Testing

Prove it prices correctly before a single customer invoice depends on it.

UAT strategy, scripts & real-world test cases
Parallel runs against legacy Excel results
Defect triage & resolution tracking
Business sign-off readiness

Output: Signed-off UAT

ERP Integration

Eliminate manual keying for good—approved prices flow straight into the ERP.

Condition record & pricing procedure mapping
Interface design with your IT or SI partner
Rebate, chargeback & settlement alignment
End-to-end order-to-cash validation

Output: Automated price load

Price Data Distribution

Getting prices into the ERP is half the job. Current, future-dated, and historical pricing has to reach every system and channel that depends on it—accurately and on time.

Current & future-dated price feeds to digital channels
Historical price repository for reporting & audit
APIs, scheduled feeds & change-only delivery
AI-ready pricing data sets for analytics & models
Data ownership, governance & reconciliation

Downstream destinations

E-commerce & B2B portals Customer EDI price catalogs Sales rep & mobile apps BI & reporting Data warehouse / lake AI & analytics models Supplier & partner portals

Output: One source of pricing truth, everywhere

Implementation

Launch, stabilize, and make sure the team actually retires the spreadsheets.

Cutover planning & go-live command center
Training, SOPs & role-based playbooks
Hypercare & issue resolution
Adoption tracking & KPI baseline

Output: Stable, adopted system

What Changes

Before and after a pricing system.

The goal isn't new software. It's a pricing operation that's faster, auditable, and protects margin by design.

Today: Excel-driven

After: System-driven

Scenario planning

Offline grids, rebuilt for every price move

Reusable scenarios with instant margin impact

Getting prices into the ERP

Keyed by hand, line by line

Approved prices post automatically

Approvals

Email threads and hallway sign-offs

Routed workflow with margin guardrails

Audit trail

Whoever last saved the file

Every change logged: who, what, when

Prices in digital channels

Files exported and uploaded by hand; web and ERP drift apart

Current and future prices published automatically

Price history for reporting & AI

Scattered across old spreadsheet versions

Clean, queryable repository ready for BI and models

Time to execute a price change

Weeks

Days

Analyst time

Maintaining spreadsheets

Analyzing price, mix, and competitors

Vendor-Neutral by Design

We don't sell software. We help you pick the right answer.

Enterprise pricing platforms are powerful but often oversized for mid-market budgets. Custom tools are fast but need a long-term owner. We lay out the real trade-offs and recommend the path that fits your complexity, ERP, and team.

Option A

Enterprise Pricing Platform

Dedicated price optimization and management software, integrated with your ERP.

Best fit: high SKU and customer complexity, dedicated pricing team

Option B

ERP-Native Pricing

Extend what you already own—e.g., SAP S/4HANA condition technique and Settlement Management.

Best fit: strong ERP footprint, rebate & chargeback heavy programs

Option C

Custom-Built Pricing Tool

A purpose-built scenario and approval app that loads directly to your ERP.

Best fit: unique pricing logic, speed to value, controlled budget

Results

Real transformations, real margin.

Client names are kept confidential. Outcomes are not.

Excel → ERP

Multi-State Beer Distributor

BlueprintBuildUATERP Integration

Challenge

Price scenario planning lived in offline Excel grids across multiple states and customer segments. Approved prices were then keyed manually into the ERP, leaving analysts buried in administrative work.

Solution

Blueprinted and built a standardized, web-based price scenario planning platform connected directly to the order-to-cash system, with real-time margin modeling, competitive intelligence, and negotiation simulation.

$18.2M

Annual revenue uplift

60%

Faster pricing cycle

Offline grids re-keyed

International Food Distributor

BlueprintERP IntegrationImplementation

Challenge

Complex pricing spanning assortments, accumulation programs, credit management, and supplier chargebacks—run through fragmented legacy systems and spreadsheets with no real-time transparency.

Solution

Implemented SAP S/4HANA Settlement Management, consolidating pricing programs into a rules-based engine with automated chargebacks, supplier reconciliation, and accumulation tracking.

$23M

Margin leakage recovered

3,400+

Manual hours eliminated

87%

Faster dispute resolution

Ways to Work Together

Start small, or hand us the whole journey.

Every engagement is scoped to where you are today—whether you're still in spreadsheets or already mid-implementation.

Start Here

Pricing Tech Diagnostic

A short, fixed-scope assessment of your current pricing process and systems.

Spreadsheet & process inventory
Margin leakage and risk hotspots
Build-vs-buy direction
Prioritized roadmap & budget range

Book a Diagnostic

Most Complete

Full Transformation

All seven phases, from blueprint through go-live, with one accountable lead.

Blueprint & vendor selection
Build oversight & UAT ownership
ERP integration & downstream data feeds
Cutover planning
Hypercare & adoption tracking

Discuss a Transformation

Targeted

Phase-Specific Support

Expert help exactly where your project needs it—including rescues.

Independent vendor selection
UAT leadership or recovery
ERP integration design review
Price data feeds & repository design
Business-side PMO alongside your SI

Get Targeted Help

Blane Wortham

Founder & Principal

$550M+

Annual revenue impact from a price scenario planner he built

4,400

Analyst hours saved each year by moving pricing off manual grids

1,000+

Stakeholders aligned on new pricing tools and processes

Meet the Founder

Pricing operators first. Technologists second.

ATW Cloud was founded by Blane Wortham, a commercial finance and pricing leader with 10+ years inside a multi-billion-dollar national distributor. He has owned P&Ls up to $400M and led pricing across a $26B portfolio, always from the business side of the table, never the vendor side.

Pricing strategy & scenario planning that moves teams off manual spreadsheets
ERP pricing integration, including SAP S/4HANA and Settlement Management
AI-driven pricing automation that turns days of work into minutes
Change management that gets new tools adopted, not just installed

B.A., Economics & Business Administration, Austin College

That means we know which spreadsheet logic is load-bearing, which approval steps actually matter, and what "done" looks like to the pricing analyst who has to use the system on Monday morning. We bring enterprise-grade pricing and ERP discipline to growing distributors, without Big 4 overhead, junior staffing, or a software quota to hit.

FAQ

Common questions.

Our Excel pricing models work. Why change?

The models usually aren't the problem—the handoffs are. Every time a price moves from a spreadsheet into the ERP by hand, you add keying errors, lag, and lost audit trail. We keep the logic your team trusts and remove the manual re-entry.

Should we buy a pricing platform or build something custom?

It depends on your pricing complexity, ERP, budget, and internal IT capacity. We run a structured build-vs-buy evaluation across enterprise pricing platforms, ERP-native pricing, and custom builds, and recommend the option that fits—we don't resell software.

Which ERPs do you work with?

Our deepest experience is SAP, including S/4HANA pricing condition records and Settlement Management. For other ERPs we design the integration through standard interfaces and work alongside your IT team or systems integrator.

Can you get our pricing into e-commerce, EDI, and reporting systems too?

Yes—that's a dedicated phase of our roadmap. We design how current, future-dated, and historical pricing flows from your pricing system and ERP to e-commerce and B2B portals, customer EDI price catalogs, sales apps, BI tools, and data repositories used for analytics and AI, with clear ownership and reconciliation.

How long does a pricing technology transformation take?

A diagnostic takes a few weeks. Vendor selection commonly runs two to three months. Full implementation typically runs several months to a year depending on scope, number of pricing programs, and integration complexity.

Can you step into a project that's already underway?

Yes. We frequently join mid-stream to rescue stalled UAT, untangle integration issues, or give the business side an independent voice alongside the implementation partner.