Name: Eliminating Spreadsheet Chaos: The Business Case for ProPricer
Uploaded: 2026-10-06T19:30:45.929Z
Duration: 32 min
Description: Eliminating Spreadsheet Chaos: The Business Case for ProPricer

Transcript for "Eliminating Spreadsheet Chaos: The Business Case for ProPricer": Hello everyone. I'm Lisa Bergstrom, Senior Marketing Manager for Deltek. Thank you for joining us for today's presentation. Before I get started, I have a few administrative items to note. For the best webinar experience, please use Google Chrome. If you have a question, please type it into the Q and A box anytime during the presentation. We will address as many questions as we can at the conclusion of the webinar and any questions left unanswered will be addressed individually offline following today's presentation. Resources, including the presentation slides, are available for you to download in the resources tab on your screen. You will also receive the on demand recording of today's webinar via email within twenty four hours after the webinar ends. So, with that Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining. Today, we're tackling a challenge that impacts pricing teams across government contracting, how to move from spreadsheet driven chaos to a governed defensible pricing process. My name is Jonathan Trujillo. I'm a solutions engineer with Deltek Propricer. I work with government contractors and professional services firms, helping teams move away from spreadsheet sheet based pricing toward a guided, governed, and traceable process. I'm looking forward to walking you through the business case today. Here's what we'll cover. First, the five dimensions framework that defines what audit readiness looks like. Followed by the market moment: why pricing defensibility has become the filter for winning proposals. We'll diagnose how spreadsheets fail at each of these dimensions, show you Propricer's solution to these, and we'll close with how business is impacted. Every proposal you win or lose comes down to five core dimensions. Top performers operate by five core dimensions that define audit ready, scalable pricing. Consistency. All proposals follow the same logic and standards. This means similar opportunities use similar pricing methodologies. It's not ad hoc. It's repeatable. Traceability: Every number, every rate, every assumption, every markup traces back to a documented source. You can show the path from source data through the calculation to the final price. Reusability. Pricing models and BOE components are built once and reused across proposals. You're not rebuilding staffing models, from scratch every time. Clear controls over who changes what, when, and with what justification. Risky assumptions don't slip through unchecked. And defendability. When a customer or an auditor asks, why this price? You have a documented answer. Spreadsheets break all five. Propricer fixes all five. We just walked through the five dimensions framework. Now, let's take a look at why it matters right now. Four statistics according to the 2026 Clarity Industry Study that tell the story. 15% revenue growth in 2025. That's real growth in government contracting. But here's the challenge. 38% of proposals fail due to pricing defensibility, not technical capability. Think about that. Teams invest in technical differentiation, but they're losing proposals because of pricing defensibility, not the solution. 48% industry win rate on certified cost pricing contracts. That's where most of you live. Contracts that require certified cost data. CAS compliance. FAR compliance. That's less than a 50% win rate. But top performers see a 72% win rate on the same contracts. That's a 24 spread. Same contract type, same evaluators, same requirements. The difference? It's not better people. It's process, discipline, and governance. This 24 gap between industry average and top performers is where the opportunity lives. And it's not a mystery. It's predictable. Let's walk through each dimension and show you exactly where spreadsheets fail. Consistency. Here's the reality. There's no standard templates. Each proposal starts from a different baseline, either a blank sheet or an old proposal barely adapted to the new scope. Different teams use different methodologies. Project A applies a 10% markup. Project B applies a 15%. Why? Different assumptions, different people, different time. Assumptions get buried in sales. You open a spreadsheet and ask, why is this labor rate 10% higher than that one? Nobody knows. It's just in the formula. Scenario changes cascade unpredictably. Client says, reduce this labor by 10%. You copy the sheet, manually reprice 50 cells, hoping you don't miss a dependency. Auditors see this inconsistent methodology and flag it as a governance weakness. Pricing credibility decays and your win rate declines. Traceability. Every time you move the data from source system to a spreadsheet, you'll lose that trail. Labor rates live in your HR system. You pull them today and paste them into a spreadsheet. That source link is gone. If rates change tomorrow, your proposal still has yesterday's numbers. That's staleness risk. Version chaos. You've all seen this. Proposal version three final actual final dot xlsx. Which one actually submitted? Which version did the auditor see? You can't trace it back. Changes are happening without record. A colleague edits a formula. Three days later, you don't know who, when, or why. You just know the number changed. Complex formulas with hidden dependencies. You modify one cell, and four other cells break silently. When an auditor or a customer asks, trace this number back to its source, you're reverse engineering your own spreadsheet. That's not defensible. It's a fire drill. Imagine an auditor requests support for that $250 an hour labor rate used in the proposal. You dig through emails, spreadsheets, and notes for hours to reconstruct where that rate came from. When you find it, you realize it's from a different project's estimate, not the current rate. Now you're explaining why your pricing is based on stale data. Reusability. Now here's where rework multiplies. Proposals and BOE elements rebuilt from scratch every time. You built a staffing model for project a. That's three senior developers, two mid developers, one QA. Perfect fit. Then project b comes in with a similar scope. Do you reuse that model? No. You rebuild it from scratch because there's no component library, even though it's the same work. There's no institutional knowledge transfer. The analysts who built that model understood why three seniors work better than four, but that knowledge stays locked away in their head or in their spreadsheet. When they leave, it goes with them. Scenario modeling. That requires copying the entire sheet. Client says, what if we had two fewer developers? You copy the whole spreadsheet, edit 30 cells manually, hope for no errors. That's hours of additional work. Forty percent of analyst time spent on copy and paste rework, not pricing strategy. Multiply that by 50 proposals a year, and you're burning thousands of hours on rebuilding what's already been done. Here's an example. Your firm bids 12 similar proposals a year for a large customer. The first proposal takes three weeks to develop. The second, two and a half because someone recycles part of the first. By the twelfth, you'd think that it'd only be a few days. It's not. Each one still takes a week and a half because each analyst builds their version from scratch. Governance. This is where compliance risk accumulates. Anyone with access can edit anything. There's no role based controls. Junior analyst edits a critical labor rate. Nobody approves it. It stays in the proposal and gets submitted. This happens more often than you'd like. Risky assumptions slip through unchecked. A 15% markup applied without policy justification? A blended rate that doesn't align with the customer type? These things make it to submission because there's no approval gate catching them. Annual reconciliation before submission catches errors too late. The day before submission, someone finally compares the spreadsheet to the cost volume and finds 12 discrepancies. It's all rework and it's all rushed. There's no change management. Decisions aren't recorded or justified. When the audit finds something questionable, you can't explain why. You didn't document it. This leads to compliance failures, rework on resubmission, leadership loses confidence, finance starts questioning pricing because they can't see how decisions were made. A proposal submitted with an indirect rate assumption that doesn't match current company guidance gets flagged by an auditor. You resubmit. That's a three week delay. The customer is frustrated and your competitive position is damaged. If there had been a governance gate, the noncompliant assumption would have been caught and corrected before submission, not after. Defendability. This is the final dimension, and it's where spreadsheet chaos becomes business risk. Pricing rationale isn't recorded. That's just what we assumed. That's not defensible. That's a guess. Assumptions get buried in formulas. Why is this 10 markup here? It's in the formula somewhere, but there's no explanation. No documentation. Just a number in a cell. You can't defend escalations or markups on questions. Customers push back on a line item. You try to explain. You're essentially reverse engineering your own estimate on the fly. Complex formulas with no comments. The logic is a black box. Only the original builder understands it. This results in the customer disputes taking weeks to resolve. Compliance reviews surface undocumented assumptions and trigger rework. Auditors have to dig to understand your pricing logic. Regulatory exposure increases because you can't prove pricing was applied consistently. So we've shown you the problem. Spreadsheets break all these five dimensions: consistency, traceability, reusability, governance, defendability. All of them suffer under spreadsheet based pricing. Now, let's talk about the solution. Propricer addresses all five dimensions across the proposal lifecycle. Let's walk through four phases: initiation, development, refinement, and execution. Initiation is about starting every proposal from a defensible baseline, not a blank page. Three things happen. One, templates. When a user creates a proposal, they don't get a blank spreadsheet. Propricer offers a template library. They select a template for their engagement type, fixed price manufacturing, T and M systems integration, whatever. The proposal populates automatically with the organization's set standard structure, labor categories aligned to the customer's labor classification system, cost categories proven to work, and governance rules embedded in the system and template. Centralized data integration. Labor rates don't get manually copied anymore. Propricer connects to your HR system, cost databases, and houses your historical proposals. Rates populate automatically with a source. Data is always current. Governance rules embedded in templates. An estimator only sees data for the proposal that they're assigned to. Rates can be hidden from view entirely and labor category selection can be locked to a pre approved list. That access is active from the moment the proposal is created. A risky assumption doesn't slip through because the estimator never had access to make it. This results in consistency that is enforced by design. New proposals are 40% faster because they start structured, not blank. And governance is active from minute one, not something applied at review. Let me show you what this looks like in practice. I'm starting a brand new proposal from the fixed price manufacturing template. The template populates automatically with a full proposal breakdown structure, standard roles, and standard cost categories. Labor and ODC costs come in up to date and the current burden pools are already attached. The result? A structured starting point, not a blank page. Development of the BOE is where the heavy lifting happens. And this release brings two new capabilities that make it both simpler and more governed. The BOE authoring view and our new BOE drafting agent with Della. Let's take a sneak peek at both. One of the biggest challenges our customers tell us is that creating BOEs feels overwhelming. There are too many screens, too many steps, too much to understand about the underlying system architecture. So, we asked ourselves, what if we simplified this? What if we made it less like a software and more like a guided experience? If I had to sum it up in a few words, it's like a guided tax preparer, but for BOEs. Instead of starting from a blank BOE, the view asks you one question at a time. Pick your assigned breakdown structure element, then your text, then your estimate. It starts with your assignments. So authors land on a page with their proposals and BOEs that they already have access to. And the steps are adaptive. Your organization dictates what information is required and selectable in these sections. Here's the authoring view dashboard. This is your starting point. Notice it only shows the proposals I've been assigned to. That's another example of governance by role. The same kind of access control we talked about back in initiation. It also keeps a list of every BOE I've authored, so I can start from a new one from a past example instead of starting over. The authoring view puts you on a clear path. You move through each step sequentially. Start with the BOE header. What WBS are you writing to? What's the BOE name? What custom fields do you need? Then, if you're using historical actuals, we bring those in. Then you move into the section step. Before you even start writing, we set up the sections for you. These are defined by your proposal team, your basis of estimate, your methodology, your assumptions, whatever your governance requires. The author doesn't have to know how the system works underneath. They just see, here are some questions I need to answer, and for each section, we guide them on what to include. This is where it gets powerful. Once you've written your narrative, you move to calculations. The recommended approach: as you write your text, you build formulas directly into it using a formula creator. You reference actuals data. You specify what resources you need and the system automatically spreads those across your period of performance. But here's what makes it different. If you don't manually create formulas, the system can intelligently detect them from your text. Either way, you're in control. This is Dela and specifically the BOE drafting agent, new in this release. Dela runs on your own approved language model on prem. Deltek does not collect or train on this data. It stays inside your environment. Let me show you what it can do. We can use Ask Della to draft a narrative. Before I ask Della to draft anything, the BOE needs to be ready. The statement of work is attached and if I already have estimates on the BOE, Della takes those into account too. I click the ask Della and ask it to draft a BOE narrative. It reads the statement of work, looks at the BOE section definitions, and if it needs more information, it asks, how many hours? What's the peer to performance? Any key assumptions? I can correct it if anything needs to be changed, and it'll redraft it. Here's the important part. Nothing moves into the BOE while I'm having this conversation. Only when I click insert to BOE does the text actually land in the BOE, and that action is locked. Who did it and when? I can also ask Della to review an existing BOE and suggest edits. And again, nothing changes until I approve it. Refinement. This is where proposals move through approval gates. Reviewers see a structured, focused views instead of a full spreadsheet, and the system automatically flags it if BOE and its proposal estimates stop matching after a change. Reviews move faster because the reviewers know exactly what to look at. Here's what a structured review looks like. Focused visibility. Reviewers see only what changed since the last review, not the entire spreadsheet. Flag deviations. If the BOE narrative and the proposal estimate stop matching after a change, the system flags it and can block advancement until it's fixed. That's compliance by design, not an exception. Governance rules and compliance standards are enforced automatically at every step. Here's where it all comes together: defensibility. Every pricing decision ties back to its source data and the reasoning behind it. When an auditor asks you to prove a number, you don't just reconstruct it from memory. The answer is already documented. That's defensibility by design. We've reached the last step of this pricing lifecycle: execution, where it all matters. This is where your governance becomes operational reality and where every proposal enters the customer's hands audit ready and defensible. Execution is the moment of truth. In the spreadsheet world, submission is a risk event. The BOE is one sheet. The cost volume is another. Numbers have to match. Formats have to align. Manual reentry. Transcript errors. Version mismatches. ProPricer changes that. Cost volume pro is an automated cost volume assembly platform that natively embeds your approved propricer proposal data directly into the cost volume. It automates final submission package assembly, pulling pricing outputs into a formatted submission ready deliverable. No manual format adjustment. No last minute reconciliation between the BOE and the cost volume. The output is comprehensive, consistent, and controlled every time, which cuts the manual formatting work teams normally do right before the deadline. Submission should be minutes, not hours of anxiety. One governed source feeds the entire deliverable. No reentry, no transcription errors, no version mismatches. Compare that to the spreadsheet world where you're manually formatting and checking and praying everything matches. This is submission as it should be. Accurate, fast, compliant. So we've walked through the life cycle: initiation with guided templates and centralized data, development of cost with step by step process and governed AI, refinement with structured review and audit trails, Execution with cost volume generation. Now, let's quantify that impact. Estimating confidence. The industry average sits at 41, somewhat confident. Top performers are at 66%, that's very confident. That's a 25 gap. And it starts with connected, governed data, not more experience or new methodology. Win rate on certified contracts. A stat we saw in an earlier slide. Top performers are winning nearly three out of four certified cost and pricing bids. The rest of the industry is winning fewer than one in two. Formal tool usage. 57% of the industry uses a formal pricing tool. Top performers are at 69%. That's a 12 gap. Using a tool isn't the differentiator by itself. It's what separates the two groups most consistently in the data. ERP integration, 78% industry average versus a 90% for top performers. That's a 12 gap as well. This is the infrastructure underneath every advantage top performers hold. The story here isn't Excel versus Propricer. It's what top performers are already doing differently. Connected systems, formal tools, Governed data. Propricer is how you get there. Let me recap the journey. Spreadsheet chaos is a choice. Not because spreadsheets are evil. They're just not designed for governance and scale. When pricing lacks structure, you get rework. Errors. Audit risk. The five dimensions define audit readiness. Consistency. That's the same logic across proposals. Traceability, every number tied to a source. Reusability, build once, use it many times. Governance, it's the controls you implement to prevent risk. And defendability, pricing that withstands scrutiny. These five pillars are the framework. Propricer delivers all five. Through guided workflows at initiation, guided steps, authoring and governed AI at cost development, structured review and explicit rationale at refinement, and cost volume generation at execution. The confidence gap equals your win rate gap. Connected, governed processes drive both. It's not magic, it's discipline. The journey to defensible pricing is iterative, but it's worth taking. Thank you for joining us. We've covered a lot of ground: where pricing processes break, how the five dimensions fix them, what Propricer delivers, and the business impact. Speed, clarity, control. That's our promise, and it's the outcome you'll see when you move from spreadsheet chaos to governed intelligent pricing. Okay. Thanks, Jonathan. That was a really great presentation. Before we dive into our q and a for today, we do have a polling question for the audience. So I'm gonna go ahead and open the poll, and, we would love to have everybody share or or choose a selection here and answer our polling question. Would you like to be contacted by a sales representative to learn more about Propricer, the industry standard proposal pricing solution for government contractors? So we'll just give it a minute here and, allow everyone to answer our polling question. And then we'll go ahead and take questions. And to review how you enter a question, you are just gonna go to the q and a tab, enter your question, and Jonathan will go ahead and, take some questions in a second here. Alright. So we have some good questions coming in, to start with. Jonathan, what is a good strategy to follow when it comes to cost proposals, price sheets, etcetera? The, the strongest proposals treat pricing as, like, a governed process rather than a series of one off spreadsheets. A good strategy starts with standardizing your inputs, building in that traceability we talked about from the start. The goal is repeatable defensible process that scales with the proposal in your pricing process. Okay. Thank you. Okay. We have another one here. One of the recurring challenges in GovCon pricing is evaluating the impact of different productive hour assumptions. So, let's see. Wait. I'm sorry. Such as, nineteen twenty versus twenty eighty hours. Can Proprizer perform rapid sensitivity analyses to show how changes in those assumptions affect labor rates, profitability, and overall proposal pricing? Yeah. Absolutely. I see this all the time. It's one of the clearest cases for moving off of spreadsheets where changing a single assumption like productive hours usually means manually touching dozens of linked tabs and formulas, with real risk of breaking those those cells. In Propricer, those productive hour assumptions, they're structured, governed inputs, so changing the assumption propagates automatically through the labor rate calculations, your cost buildups, profitability across the entire proposal. And then, pricers can run side by side comparisons, such as that nineteen twenty versus the twenty eighty hours, and immediately see the downstream impact on labor rates, total cost, and margin without manually rebuilding the entire model. Okay. Alright. We have another question here. How can organizations create strong price proposals with limited or no information within the RFP regarding funding available, case loads, etcetera? Right. I help customers with this all the time, and the successful transitions are phased rather than a single cutover. Organizations typically start by running their new platform in parallel or on a lower risk, non time sensitive proposal. That way, they can validate their rate structures, their BOE workflows, and whatever, specific outputs before they retire entirely the spreadsheet process. Okay. How do organizations successfully transition from spreadsheet based pricing to an enterprise pricing platform while maintaining proposal agility and avoiding disruption to active capture and proposal efforts? I think that's pretty similar to the last, last question. I would talk about doing that phased approach rather than that single, cutover. That's... We start by migrating a reusable content library, meaning standard labor categories, rate tables, historical BOEs, is critical since it gives your teams an immediate head start rather than asking them to build from that blank platform. Okay. Alright. Let's see here. Just scrolling through. Okay. I think what we'll do is, we'll close the q and a portion of the webinar. If we weren't able to get to your question, we will follow-up with you directly offline. But before we officially conclude, we want to remind you we'll receive an on demand recording of today's webinar via email within twenty four hours. And with that, I'd like to thank you for joining us today. Please visit deltek.com for more upcoming Deltek events. Have a great rest of your day.