How SAP and Twenty5 Are Advancing A&D Bid Accuracy and Closing the Gap Between Sales and Delivery

13 hours ago
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SHARP VISION PODCAST · EPISODE 11

Listen to the full episode of Sharp Vision with Twenty5 and hear Dave Blatner and John Mikos break it down in their own words. Available now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ahYf4gKeKo

Getting a bid wrong in Aerospace & Defense doesn't just cost you the contract, it can cost you the company. In this episode of Sharp Vision with Twenty5, co-founder and CEO Magnus Bjorendahl sits down with Dave Blatner, SAP Industry Advisor for Aerospace & Defense, and John Mikos, SAP A&D Value Advisor and former U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel, to unpack why the bid accuracy and cost estimating problem in A&D remains so persistent, and how the Twenty5 and SAP partnership is uniquely positioned to solve it.

The Billion-Dollar Problem No One Has Fixed

Open any business headline in aerospace and defense and you'll find the same story: programs over budget, contracts delivered late, billions in overruns. It's not a new problem. But it keeps happening, and the culprit, more often than not, is still a patchwork of Excel spreadsheets.

"It's an area where it's really ripe for modernization," says Dave Blatner. "As much as you think these are modern enterprises —all AI and fancy — the real reality is there's still a ton of Excel spreadsheets being used to consolidate things and bring things together."

Dave Blatner and John Mikos painted a picture of an industry at a crossroads. On one side: legacy prime A&D contractors, like Lockheed Martin and RTX, have 40 to 50 years of project history, but deal with estimating processes fragmented across engineering, manufacturing, supply chain, and program management. On the other side: a new wave of agile defense startups moving from zero to swarm drone capability in a single calendar year, bidding on the same programs with gut instinct and no data foundation.

Both face the same underlying challenge of getting the data right before the bid goes out the door.

Winning the Bid Is Only Half the Battle

For years, the industry was laser-focused on probability of win. Get the contract, worry about delivery later. That mindset, as John Mikos puts it bluntly, has been an expensive mistake.

"25 years ago, the focus was on probability of winning the work and figuring out how to deliver it later. Now, companies are recognizing that is a very costly proposition."

Magnus Bjorendahl, Twenty5's CEO, grounded this in the founding story of the company itself. Cubic Corporation, one of Twenty5's earliest customers, built the platform out of a hard business reality: a fundamental breakdown between sales and delivery was eroding margin before a single project kicked off. Sales committed to 20%. Delivery could only execute at 10–15%. The handoff was where accountability went to die.

That gap, between what was sold and what could be delivered, is where margins go to die. And it all starts at the bid.

The Twenty5 and SAP partnership is built to close that gap. Not just by improving the bid, but by connecting the bid all the way through to delivery, and back again.

1 + 1 = 3: The Value of the Partnership

So what does the combination of SAP and Twenty5 actually unlock that neither can deliver alone? Dave Blatner summarized it clearly:

"The Twenty5 application is built on the SAP Business Technology Platform, using the SAP HANA database underneath the hood. From an IT architecture standpoint, we're fully interlocked."

But the value runs deeper than technology. Here are the four core value drivers the group identified:

Lifecycle Profitability, Not Just Probability of Win

"The real value is profitability through the entire lifecycle." — John Mikos,

This partnership is a shift that changes everything about how A&D companies should think about capture management.

Twenty5 improves probability of win. But what it really unlocks is confidence: confidence that the labor and material cost estimates are precise, that risk is anticipated, and that the program can be delivered profitably from contract award through aftermarket and sustainment.

In an industry where the geopolitical threat environment is changing faster than acquisition cycles can keep up, a bad bid isn't just a loss. As John put it:

"A poor response and a poor bid can effectively be betting the company."

One Source of Truth Across Engineering, Supply Chain, Sales, and Finance

A large A&D program requires input from engineering, program management, manufacturing, and supply chain, each running their own systems, each estimating their own way. Excel becomes the integration layer, and that's where errors, delays, and compliance exposure get baked in.

SAP has spent years helping large A&D organizations harmonize their application landscape by rationalizing systems and moving from holding company models to true operating company models. RTX and Lockheed Martin, two of SAP's largest A&D customers, are pursuing exactly this kind of "one company" vision.

Twenty5's iPE platform plugs directly into that foundation at the critical front end: the bid and proposal stage. Estimates pull from real SAP actuals. Won proposals flow straight into SAP project creation. No re-keying. No handoff risk. One source of truth from first quote to final delivery.

Speed to Respond — Because the Government Can't Wait

The U.S. government is actively trying to compress its own acquisition timelines. The threat environment is moving faster than traditional procurement can follow, and government customers are increasingly frustrated by how long their supply chain takes to respond.

For A&D primes and suppliers, the ability to turn around an accurate, defensible proposal quickly is no longer just a competitive advantage. It's a requirement for staying relevant. Twenty5 directly accelerates that process by eliminating the manual data collection, spreadsheet consolidation, and cross-department back-and-forth that slows most organizations down.

Compliance That's Built In, Not Bolted On

Government contracting operates on open book principles. Every cost element must be traceable, defensible, and accurate. Companies that build their estimates across disparate systems, even with good intentions, open themselves to unintentional compliance violations. And in A&D, the fines are real.

"Aerospace and defense companies have to know that the source of their data is traceable, accurate, and defensible. If it's brought together in an ad-hoc way across disparate systems, it only increases the risk of error — even if it's unintentional." — John Mikos, SAP

Twenty5 embeds DFARS, TINA, and FAR 15.2 compliance directly into the estimating process, with full audit trails back to every data source. Harmonizing that in a platform that sits on SAP reduces compliance risk and accelerates time to market simultaneously.

AI That Means Something

No conversation in 2026 is complete without AI coming up, and Magnus, Dave, and John didn't shy away from it. The perspective they brought was a sharp one.

"We cannot live in a world of AI predictably or responsibly unless we're able to leverage that back and trace that back to a source of truth. The model is only as good as the underlying data." — John Mikos, SAP

A&D companies are being sold AI in every direction. Most of it runs on top of fragmented, unvalidated data, which means the outputs can't be trusted or defended in a TINA submission. Twenty5 and SAP solve the data problem first. That's what makes AI actually useful in this domain.

Dave Blatner outlined a near-future where AI enables horizontal estimating across an entire supply chain, where a Tier 1 propulsion supplier's cost database can flow directly into a prime's overall rack-and-stack estimate, in real time, without manual handoffs. That's not a theoretical vision, it's where Twenty5’s solution is heading.

The Bottom Line

The A&D industry doesn't have a technology problem. It has a data confidence problem. Estimates built across disconnected systems, consolidated in spreadsheets, and handed off without accountability aren't just inefficient, they're a liability.

The Twenty5 and SAP partnership addresses this at the root. By combining Twenty5's intelligent pricing and estimating platform, which is native to SAP's Business Technology Platform, with SAP's deep A&D implementation expertise and enterprise infrastructure, A&D organizations finally have a path from guesswork to governance.

Bid smarter. Win with confidence. Deliver profitably. That's the promise, and it's all backed by the data to prove it.

Listen to Twenty5’s Podcast, Sharp Vision for more insights on Spotify, Apple Podcast, or YouTube.