How ZS Is Building a Data-Driven Pricing Foundation with Twenty5
- 18 hours ago
- 3 min read
ZS is a global management consulting firm that operates at the intersection of strategy, data, and technology. With a finance business partnering team of 30+ professionals supporting the business across every corner of the globe, pricing complexity isn't a once-in-a-while challenge. It's a daily one.
The work ZS delivers is deeply bespoke. No two client engagements look the same, which means pricing can't be reduced to a formula. With the majority of projects sold on a fixed fee basis, margin isn't protected by contracts alone. It's protected by the quality of decisions made by leaders every single day.
As Jade Ellerby, Director of Finance at ZS, puts it: "Our margins are heavily dependent on three things: the ability to articulate value when setting the price, accurate cost estimation, and robust scope management. Those three things mean our margins are heavily dependent on decisions made by leaders in the business every day."
The Problem: Scattered Data, Duplicated Effort
For a firm running hundreds of complex engagements simultaneously, the limitations of spreadsheet-based pricing were becoming impossible to ignore. Pricing data lived in siloed Excel files. Teams were re-entering the same information across multiple systems. And with no single source of truth, understanding what was driving variance between planned and actual performance was a manual, fragmented process.
"Our pricing was scattered across Excel files in different locations, shared with people and collaborated on," Jade explains. "That makes for very inefficient processes — business teams inputting the same information multiple times in multiple different systems."
The data problem extended further. SAP timesheet data sat in one format. Staffing forecasts in another. Project estimates in another. Meaningful analysis required stitching these together by hand, limiting the firm's ability to act on what the data was telling them.
The Solution: One Flow of Information Across Every System
ZS partnered with Twenty5 to implement iPE, a fully integrated pricing solution connecting their CRM, staffing and resourcing system, and SAP project setup into a single, seamless workflow. The goal: eliminate re-keying, create a central repository of client rate data, and unlock the ability to compare plan versus actuals at both project and firm-wide level.
"The integrations we're building are going to help things run seamlessly, from our CRM system through to our costing and pricing, pushing information directly to our staffing and resourcing system, and then setting up projects in SAP. One flow of information across multiple systems."
The shift also opens up capabilities that simply weren't possible before, including the ability to clone similar projects and reprice them at current rates instantly, rather than copying across Excel spreadsheets manually.
The Impact: A Stable Foundation for Smarter Decisions
The rollout began with a deliberate soft launch of approximately 70 users in the system, to validate the solution in a live environment, gather early feedback, and refine training and communications before a full firm-wide deployment.
For Jade and the team, the most significant shift isn't just operational efficiency. It's the intelligence the platform makes possible over time.
"Twenty5 is going to give us a stable foundation on which to build data-driven decisions. We can use and compare the data of how things actually go versus plan, and use that to inform what actions we should take in a current project and in pricing future projects."
That closed-loop insight, where actuals feed back into future estimates, is exactly the kind of continuous improvement that transforms pricing from a reactive exercise into a strategic advantage.
What's Next
With a full firm-wide rollout planned, ZS is looking ahead to a 2026 roadmap focused on user experience enhancements, additional project types, and deeper data-driven pricing insights at both project and firm-wide level.
"As we get into Q2 and Q3, we're really excited about harnessing the insights from the data to improve decision making at project level and at firm-wide level."
The partnership itself has been a key part of the journey. "Twenty5 have been really collaborative in helping us solve problems and solve them in the right way, understanding our business needs and building a sustainable platform. We very much appreciate all that Twenty5 have done for us this year."
From fragmented spreadsheets to a single intelligent platform, ZS is pricing with confidence.
