We had the chance to chat with Chuck Lee, Vice President of Finance at Gainwell Technologies, to discuss how Twenty5's Intelligent Pricing and Estimating Tool has helped Gainwell improve their pricing strategies.
1. Talk a bit about yourself and your role at Gainwell.
"My experience spans over 25 years and pricing leadership roles for companies like IBM, Accenture, Computer Sciences Corporation, and DXC Technologies. For many of these firms, I have led or been deeply involved in pricing transformations that included cost and pricing tool builds and implementations. This experience has allowed me to appreciate the complexities associated with solution costing and the pricing process.
It is important that companies have robust cost and pricing tools, such as Twenty5’s iPE, to facilitate the quotation process at scale."
2. What are some challenges you face working in this industry?
"Common challenges in today's pricing organizations include: Customer response times are shortening. Therefore, speed and consistency is very important while being able to be flexible for each client. The ability to think globally, reuse, standardized, and to create templates from prior pricing models to drive efficiency. Establishing effective controls for master data, for example internal and external rates, overhead development and application, bill of materials quoted and of course abiding by accounting standards. The ability for the pricing system to be able to integrate with the broader IT ecosystem, such as CRM and ERP applications. And lastly, learning faster through the use of analytics."
3. How has Twenty5 changed the way you price at Gainwell?
"I don't believe Twenty5 changed the way we price, however, implementing Twenty5 has allowed our organization to evolve without spending a ton of investment resources to retool or customize. Twenty5 was able to address most of the pain points mentioned before, and allows us to be closer to the details that make up the price.
At Gainwell, we had a custom pricing tool that was expensive to maintain. The company was going through an implementation of SAP S/4 HANA, and in order to integrate the legacy tool into SAP, we understood major investment would be required. In our search for alternatives, we found Twenty5 to be the closest tool in the market that matched up with our homegrown application from a functionality and flexibility perspective. Since I had executed a few pricing tool transformations in the past, I was prepared for what needed to happen to be successful, which made the switch easier for us.
So how did it go?
We went live on Twenty5 in 6 months. We sunset our legacy tool in 12 months. The implementation cost was about a third of the cost to customize our legacy tool. Ongoing operations is less than the legacy O&M costs of our existing old tool. And although we are still in stabilization mode, we had no major disruptions to pricing operations. in terms of benefits realized, we did reduce the reliance on individual Excel based models. However, Excel models and templates can be imported into Twenty5. We can now more easily templatize solutions and reuse prior proposals. Twenty5 integrates natively with SAP and Salesforce, and our pricing data today is now structured for insights. We can use analytics and AI leveraging our improved pricing data warehouse."
4. What type of new data do you have access to because of Twenty5's solution?
"We have significantly more information to explore using Twenty5. The data is better organized. It can be tagged in many ways, which makes it very useful when it comes to analytics. Historical pricing is centrally stored and has context at many and multiple levels. We now have insight to exceptions, which improves controls and can speed up internal governance and approval process. We have significantly improved the time to term pricing data into insights without adding resources to compile the information. We can now learn quicker. I feel we are way closer to future proof and can now begin to leverage technologies like AI with higher confidence."
5. What advice would you give someone interested in working with Twenty5?
"If I were to offer some advice to someone interested in working with Twenty5 to transform their pricing system, I would suggest the following. First, go in eyes wide open, appreciating the complexities of your pricing process. Change is difficult and most pricing systems are complex enough as it is. Secondly, I would invest in a small dedicated implementation team for program management, testing, deployment and training. You can't do your day job and do this too.
That being said, I would recommend you consider transformation in two steps. The first step would be focusing on pricing tool functionality. And the second step would be then the SAP implementation. Since Twenty5 integrates well with SAP, mapping into SAP is much easier. Focusing on the SAP alignment adds complexity and confusion because most organizations take the pricing process for granted.
Having been through this a few times, I will say that the move to Twenty5 has been pretty smooth and a good choice for Gainwell."
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