From Excel to Execution: Why Pricing Technology Adoption Is Stalling Inside ERP Landscapes

Enterprise pricing organizations face a pivotal moment. Zilliant’s 2025 Pricing Technology Trends report reveals that although pricing is increasingly seen as a key driver for growth and profitability, its implementation is still mostly manual and disjointed. Even though more than half of surveyed organizations use pricing management software, spreadsheets continue to dominate daily workflows, with many relying on Excel as their main pricing tool.

For SAP-centric enterprises, this gap is especially significant. Many organizations have invested heavily in SAP S/4HANA, SAP CPQ, and advanced analytics platforms, yet pricing decisions often happen outside the ERP core. As a result, pricing functions seem digitally enabled on the surface but still rely on manual approvals, offline analysis, and large teams to fill execution gaps.

Zilliant’s survey of 550 pricing professionals across manufacturing, distribution, retail, and services reveals a key paradox: while satisfaction with pricing technology is high, adoption rates are still low. Only a small number of organizations primarily use technology to manage pricing, indicating that many ERP investments aren’t leading to operational pricing discipline. This gap raises concerns for SAP customers aiming to expand their pricing strategies across complex product and customer portfolios.

Excel’s Enduring Grip on Enterprise Pricing

Excel’s persistence goes beyond resisting change. Pricing affects sales, finance, marketing, and operations, but many organizations lack the governance needed for system-based decisions. Few have formal pricing councils or consistent analytics, leaving spreadsheets as the fallback when systems don’t align.

In SAP environments, this often causes fragmented pricing execution. Price updates may be designed externally but take weeks to implement in SAP, reducing responsiveness to market changes. Even when price increases are approved, organizations often only realize a portion of the intended value due to delays, overrides, and inconsistent discounting practices during sales processes.

Manual pricing also incurs high operational costs. Large pricing teams are common, often responsible for reconciling data, managing exceptions, and resolving system conflicts. Instead of expanding pricing capabilities, ERP investments can unintentionally add complexity for staff when pricing logic isn’t integrated directly into transactional workflows.

Why Partial Adoption Masks Execution Risk

Momentum toward adopting pricing technology is clear. Almost all companies surveyed by Zilliant are investing in or actively assessing pricing tools, with balanced interest in pricing management, optimization, and analytics. Companies that primarily use technology-driven pricing already see higher profitability and slightly better revenue performance than those relying on manual methods.

The risk comes from partial adoption. Many businesses implement pricing tools without fully integrating them into SAP workflows, governance structures, or sales processes. Zilliant calls this condition “Pricing Anxiety”—a hesitation to trust system-generated recommendations or to clearly assign responsibility for pricing results. In SAP environments, this frequently leads to too much manual approval, frequent overrides in CPQ or sales modules, and inconsistent pricing enforcement.

As pricing becomes more dynamic and data-driven, these gaps grow more costly. The next stage of pricing transformation won’t be about adding more tools but about integrating pricing intelligence directly into ERP execution and aligning people, processes, and systems around a single source of truth.

What This Means for SAPinsiders

Pricing execution now serves as a key competitive advantage. SAP customers who handle pricing outside of core ERP workflows experience slower deal cycles and continuous margin loss. Integrating pricing logic directly into SAP order-to-cash processes allows for quicker execution and more reliable value capture.

Automation is already boosting profitability for early adopters. Organizations that mainly use automated pricing see significantly better profit results than those using manual methods. For SAP leaders, this highlights the need to integrate pricing technology with S/4HANA, CPQ, and finance systems instead of treating pricing as a separate function.

Governance determines whether pricing technology provides value. Successful companies typically establish pricing councils, assign ownership, and standardize approval workflows within ERP systems. When evaluating pricing solutions, SAPinsiders should focus on ERP integration depth, pricing recommendation transparency, and the ability to implement pricing decisions quickly at transaction speed.