Below is a Q&A session with Sebastian Dewhurst, General Manager of EASA, Inc.
For over a decade, EASA has been helping companies such as AIG, Ingersoll Rand, LeasePlan, and Zurich Financial to repurpose valuable Excel spreadsheets as sophisticated web based CPQ applications.
Pricing is a critical aspect of business operations, influencing profitability and competitiveness. While there are various off-the-shelf CPQ (configure-price-quote) tools available to manage pricing strategies, Excel has long been a popular choice due to its versatility and widespread availability.
We recently caught up with Dr. Sebastian Dewhurst, General Manager at EASA, to talk about the advantages and disadvantages of using Excel spreadsheets for CPQ, and how the EASA platform has helped both large and small companies overcome the disadvantages, while avoiding the cost and effort of migrating to a dedicated CPQ solution.
General Manager at EASA
First and foremost, can you please share with us a brief overview of your company? When and how was EASA established?
20 years ago, our founders were working for an engineering software company – AEA Technology, later acquired by Ricardo – that developed a range of specialized simulation software tools. We observed the rapid proliferation of these tools in the industry, designed to address an ever-increasing range of highly specialized customer needs. This trend, while inevitable, introduced a new problem – the expertise and learning curve required to use these software tools restricted their use to only a small subset of users. Many potential users who might have benefited could not actually do so. Compounding the problem was the fact that many critical business processes involve multiple tools, often from multiple vendors; the lack of any integration resulted in much wasted effort, with users manually stepping through a given workflow.
The original vision of EASA was to provide companies with a new option – to create “wrappers” with dedicated, simplified user interfaces that would drive entire software workflows. The user would no longer need to be an expert or to know the details of how to operate the individual programs, and individual software tools could be integrated and run as an automated sequence. The end goal was to expand the base of users beyond just the modeling experts, while also greatly reducing the time and effort needed to execute such software workflows.
The result – we created one of the first low-code application development platforms – EASA web apps are built without the need for programming. Furthermore, since EASA is designed to be agnostic and can be connected to almost any other software, it created an entirely new business opportunity. Thus, EASA as a company was created in 2008 and spun off.
Interestingly, using EASA to deploy and share important Excel spreadsheets as web apps quickly emerged as one of the favorite use-cases for EASA. It’s a perfect fit, and often provides customers with immense value – as we will see later during this Q&A.
And while EASA has become the leader in helping companies transform many different workflows which depend on Excel into scalable, collaborative web apps, the dominant use-case by far is CPQ. Today, a clear majority of our customers use EASA to deploy one or more critical spreadsheets used for pricing as robust, secure web apps, optionally integrated with their existing systems such as CRM.
What industries do you serve and who are your current customers?
While the ubiquitous nature of spreadsheets means that today we serve customers in almost every sector, we have noticed a predominance for CPQ apps in the financial services and insurance sectors, as well as manufacturing.
I think the reasons are that these industries often sell highly configurable products and services. From experience, we know that off-the-shelf CPQ systems often cannot handle the sheer number of input variables that are required to define a final quote. Take insurance, for example; for some lines of business such as PI or D&O insurance, there may be literally hundreds of inputs that an agent needs to enter to even generate a preliminary quote. Add to that the fact that most insurance actuaries do much of their risk modeling using Excel, and it becomes almost a given that these “rating” spreadsheets are often pressed into service as CPQ tools.
Another good example is in manufacturing, often for smaller companies that are delivering highly engineered-to-order or configured-to-order products. Again, Excel is just a very natural choice of tool in order to create a pricing model. It’s just that Excel isn’t great when it comes to sharing that pricing tool with dozens of sales staff or agents.
Our better-known customers include AIG, Bayer, Borg Warner, General Electric, HP, Ingersoll Rand, KPMG, Pfizer, Schneider Electric, Procter and Gamble, and Zürich Financial, as well as many smaller companies.
Can we take a look in more detail at the advantages and disadvantages of using Excel as a CPQ tool?
Sure. Let’s look at the advantages first:
Flexibility and Customization:
Excel offers tremendous flexibility, allowing businesses to create custom pricing models tailored to their specific needs. Literally, if you can think it, you can model it in Excel – without having to be a programmer. It’s relatively easy to use formulas, functions, and formatting options to design highly sophisticated pricing spreadsheets that accommodate complex calculations involved in a company’s potential pricing scenarios. As mentioned, this flexibility seems to be particularly advantageous for businesses that require a high degree of customization and adaptability in their pricing strategies, such as insurance and some types of manufacturing.
Familiarity and Accessibility:
It’s estimated that over 750 million people use Excel daily. This is one of Excel’s biggest advantages – its widespread use and familiarity among professionals. It is a staple software in many organizations, and most employees possess a basic understanding of its capabilities. This accessibility makes it easy for teams to develop and share Excel-based pricing models. Additionally, Excel files can be easily shared via email or cloud storage (which in fact is both a blessing and a curse – we will come back to this point!)
Data Analysis and Visualization:
Excel is not only a highly capable calculation engine; it also provides powerful data analysis and visualization capabilities. It often surprises us how many pricing tools created in Excel actually employ things like charts and conditional formatting, so that users can gain valuable insights into key aspects of a quote BEFORE it is sent to the customer. In some cases, charts and graphs are PART of the quote.
Cost-Effectiveness:
Compared to specialized CPQ software, Excel is a cost-effective solution. It comes bundled with the Microsoft Office suite, which is widely used in many organizations. This eliminates the need for additional software investments and licensing fees, making it an attractive option for all companies, but especially for small and medium-sized businesses with limited budgets.
OK, now how about the disadvantages?
Many of Excel’s disadvantages as a CPQ tool fall into a category we have labeled “Excel chaos”. These will be familiar to anyone who has pressed Excel beyond its intended use as a desktop application and has attempted to use it as an enterprise application.
Error-Prone and Time-Consuming:
If you had a professional developer code up an application, would you expect them to share the source code with all the users? Of course not! And yet, in a sense, that’s what we do every time we share a spreadsheet via email or SharePoint. Allowing users to access the original spreadsheet (or a clone) is a recipe for disaster. It’s simply too easy for a user to accidentally (or intentionally) over-write a formula and fundamentally change the function of the spreadsheet. Worse, it’s all too easy for such an error to be saved and then accidentally forwarded to other users. Other issues arise from the need for manual data entry (as opposed to importing customer information automatically from a CRM system). Any of these issues can lead to pricing errors, which can have significant financial implications.
Lack of Centralized Control and Versioning:
When multiple team members are involved in pricing, maintaining control and versioning can be challenging in Excel. There is a risk of data duplication, conflicting versions, and unauthorized changes, especially when files are shared across various channels. Lack of centralized control can make it difficult to track changes and maintain an audit trail, potentially leading to confusion and discrepancies in pricing.
Inadequate Integration:
Excel’s integration capabilities may be limited when it comes to syncing with other systems or software applications. This can hinder seamless data flow between pricing and other business functions, such as inventory management, customer relationship management (CRM), or enterprise resource planning (ERP). Inefficiencies in data integration can result in disjointed processes and difficulties in maintaining pricing consistency across different platforms.
How does EASA help with “Excel chaos”?
Let’s drill down into the issues outlined above: lack of version control, lack of security for proprietary pricing logic and methods, lack of auditability of usage, dependance on error-prone manual steps such as cutting and pasting, and finally, lack of seamless integration with other systems, most notably CRM.
For an individual employee who creates and uses a spreadsheet for some ad-hoc analysis, this is often manageable simply by applying best practices. But when a “master” spreadsheet underpins an important process such as pricing, which must be accessible for multiple end-users, then “Excel chaos” is sure to follow.
However, it is possible to continue using Excel without having to deal with the downsides. EASA enables rapid creation of web apps, in a no-code environment, which connect with – and run – existing spreadsheets on a secure server. Compared with traditional desktop usage of Excel, the advantages of this approach include:
- Elimination of version confusion; end-users cannot use the wrong spreadsheet
- Elimination of compatibility issues; end-users don’t need to download the spreadsheet from a network drive, and need only a browser – important in these days of remote working. There is no concern about users’ local version of Excel, or the security settings required to enable VB and macros.
- Enabling mobile access; because EASA web apps are essentially HTML web pages, end-users can open them even on mobile devices.
- Proprietary pricing logic in the spreadsheet is secured; end-users don’t open the spreadsheet locally and cannot see or expose formulae and logic
- Audit trails are facilitated; logic remains in the spreadsheet, but users’ data is now saved in a database or a CRM system, not to flat files on local hard drives. This makes generating reports of usage, which may be required for compliance, very easy to do. It also enables collaboration.
- Improved process automation and streamlined workflow; additional capabilities not available in Excel can be added, making the app far easier and more efficient to use than the underlying spreadsheet. For example, an EASA CPQ app may automatically send an email to request management approval based conditionally on the parameters of the quote.
Can you provide some sample use-cases?
Sure – several case studies can be found here.
Tell us more about EASA. Is it available as SaaS, or on-prem?
EASA can be installed either “on prem” – which these days usually means a private AWS or Azure instance – or can be hosted by EASA. The latter option is not exactly SaaS, as it’s not self-provisioned. Nonetheless it’s an option many of our smaller customers have opted for. It’s especially useful if the end-users are in a different organization, for example agents or distributors.
The architecture is scalable – the main EASA server can communicate with multiple “Excel Servers”, which run the actual spreadsheets needed by the web apps that have been built and published on the system. In addition, apps built with EASA can be integrated with other systems, such as Salesforce.com, via web service calls.
About EASA
EASA is the industry leader in spreadsheet-to-web app technology. Headquartered in Tampa, FL, EASA has offices in Oxford, UK, and Pittsburgh, PA.
EASA was acquired by Volaris, part of Constellation Software (CSU.TO), in 2022.
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