About the Customer

This global paperboard and consumer packaging manufacturer produces packaging for some of the world’s best-known food, beverage, consumer products, and household brands. Every price it quotes has to account for fluctuating production costs, customer-specific agreements, manufacturing constraints, freight, and shifting market conditions, all at once and across multiple business units and facilities.

Since 2019, ForeFront has partnered with the company on a multi-phase transformation of its commercial operations. What began as a project to replace aging, spreadsheet-based pricing has grown into a strategic initiative: a scalable commercial engine that brings cost estimation, customer pricing, contracts, rebates, and SAP integration together on Salesforce.

Thirty Years of Pricing Logic, Outgrowing Its Tools

At the center of every pricing decision sat a cost-estimating model refined over nearly thirty years. It held decades of hard-won manufacturing expertise, but it lived in spreadsheets and had become difficult to scale, maintain, and govern as the business grew. Around it, teams juggled Excel, Access, SQL databases, SAP applications, and manual approvals. When a customer changed an order, teams recalculated pricing and validated costs by hand.

The cost of that fragmentation was measurable. A contract leakage assessment identified approximately $9.5 million in annualized revenue leakage tied to inconsistent pricing administration, surcharge management, order variances, and gaps between estimated and actual profitability. The assessment pointed to three root causes: weak pricing governance, fragmented pricing data, and heavy dependence on manual processes. Leadership, meanwhile, had limited visibility into profitability.

The company set out to reduce leakage, strengthen governance, and see profitability clearly. Leadership also knew the change was as much about people as technology: teams had to adopt new processes without losing the expertise built over decades.

Modernize Pricing First, Then Unify the Commercial Engine

ForeFront and the manufacturer shared a vision of pricing, quoting, contracting, cost estimation, and customer management operating in one ecosystem. Rather than attempt everything at once, the work moved in phases, starting with the pricing engine at the heart of the business and building outward.

ForeFront replaced the heavily customized, spreadsheet-based estimating process with a quoting and pricing platform built on Conga CPQ in Salesforce. The solution carries the model’s complex cost-estimation logic, with thousands of pricing variables, giving teams a consistent and reliable way to calculate price. To handle the model’s computational demands at enterprise scale, ForeFront implemented Heroku. As the platform matured, automated pricing workflows cut the manual effort around order changes and pricing exceptions, and standardized approvals strengthened pricing governance.

ForeFront integrated Salesforce with SAP, moving complex customer pricing and commercial data out of back-office systems and into the hands of commercial teams. Sales and pricing users now work directly with the data they need to build quotes, manage customer agreements, and make pricing decisions, without manual requests to the back office.

The partnership then extended across the commercial lifecycle: new business onboarding, commercial bidding, material production transfers, rebate management, and reporting. Information that once lived in spreadsheets, databases, and legacy tools now sits on one platform, moving the company closer to a single source of truth for commercial operations.

ForeFront is now supporting the retirement of a legacy SAP CRM pricing application, migrating critical pricing-request capabilities into Salesforce. The new solution simplifies pricing administration while supporting complex customer hierarchies, effective-dated pricing, price-sheet management, approval workflows, and integration with downstream manufacturing systems, continuing the company’s strategy of consolidating commercial processes onto one platform.

A Commercial Engine Built to Protect Margin

Today the manufacturer runs pricing, quoting, contracting, and margin management on a governed platform instead of a web of spreadsheets and databases. What began as a response to millions of dollars in identified revenue leakage has become a broader transformation of how the company prices its work and protects its margins. Key outcomes:

• Legacy spreadsheets replaced. Pricing and cost estimation moved from spreadsheets and disconnected databases into a governed enterprise platform.

• Margin visibility improved. Commercial teams and leaders see pricing, cost, and customer profitability in one place.

• Revenue leakage reduced. Pricing controls, approval workflows, and variance management help ensure customer changes are reflected in pricing and contract execution.

• Consistent pricing governance. Standardized approvals and pricing controls apply across business units and facilities.

• Better data and reporting. Sales, pricing, operations, and finance work from a shared source of commercial information.

• Faster customer response. Teams spend less time managing spreadsheets and reconciling data, and more time supporting customers.

The clearest proof is the partnership itself. Seven years and several phases in, the company continues to expand its platform with ForeFront, on a foundation built to evolve alongside the business.

The ForeFront Difference

Pricing transformations rarely stall on technology. They stall when decades of operational expertise get lost in translation. ForeFront paired packaging and commercial-operations knowledge with deep CPQ, Heroku, and SAP integration experience to bring a thirty-year cost model onto a modern platform without losing what made it valuable. Then we kept building, phase by phase. That’s the difference between a systems integrator and a strategic partner.