A multi-plant building materials manufacturer stopped letting pricing complexity become margin exposure.

When customer contracts, national account rebates, pallet logic, and cross-border entities all live in spreadsheets, pricing isn't a system. It's a risk.

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The situation

This building materials manufacturer operates across multiple plants and entities, including cross-border operations in the US, Mexico, and Canada. Their pricing complexity reflects the full range of what that scale requires: pallet thresholds, mixed-line repricing, national account rebate structures, customer-specific contracts, and vendor cost tracking across product lines sold through both distribution channels and national retailers.

Most of that logic lived in spreadsheets. The rest lived in the heads of experienced people who had managed it for years. That combination works until it doesn't. Personnel changes, contract updates, new customer tiers, and expansion into new markets all create moments where tribal knowledge fails and pricing inconsistencies surface.

By the time they found RPM, the pricing team had already reached that conclusion internally. The problem wasn't in dispute. What they needed was a solution.

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Why the ERP migration made the case stronger

The company was also preparing for an ERP migration. In most sales conversations, that detail becomes a stall. Why commit to a pricing platform now when the underlying system is about to change?

The migration reframe shifted the conversation entirely. Spreadsheet-dependent pricing logic doesn't disappear when you move to a new ERP. It gets rebuilt from scratch, mid-project, by people under deadline pressure working from incomplete records. The time to solve it is before the migration, when the knowledge still exists and the stakes are lower.

For this company, that argument landed immediately. Solving pricing before the migration wasn't a distraction from the project. It was how they'd make the project succeed.

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What the evaluation looked like

Rather than walking through a standard product tour, the demo was built entirely around their operational reality. Pallet thresholds and mixed-line repricing. National account rebate structures tied to specific retailers. Customer contract management across multiple entities. Vendor cost tracking that needed to reflect across both US and cross-border operations.

When a prospect sees their own pricing scenarios running inside a system built to handle them, the "will this work for us" question answers itself. There was no theoretical benefit to explain. The fit was visible.

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What drove the decision

• 1 The pain was already diagnosed The team had identified the problem internally before RPM entered the picture. The conversation started at the solution, not at convincing anyone something was wrong.
• 2 The ERP migration became a reason to act now Positioning RPM as a pre-migration investment reframed a common stall into urgency. Pricing chaos carried into a new ERP becomes a migration problem, not just a pricing problem.
• 3 The demo reflected their world Every scenario shown was drawn from their actual operations. That specificity builds trust faster than any feature walkthrough.
• 4 The CFO saw it live Getting the economic buyer into a real session collapsed the decision cycle. One meeting replaced multiple internal handoffs.
• 5 The ROI was concrete Multi-plant, spreadsheet-dependent pricing is a visible operational risk. Connecting RPM to margin protection, process standardization, and reduced dependency on tribal knowledge gave leadership a clear, defensible value equation.

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The broader pattern for building supply distributors

Building materials distribution carries pricing complexity that most ERPs aren't built to handle cleanly: pallet and weight-based thresholds, contractor versus retail pricing tiers, national account rebate programs, regional and seasonal price adjustments, and customer contracts that vary by project type. The result is usually a patchwork of spreadsheets and manual overrides that works until someone leaves, a contract changes, or the business grows past what the patchwork can hold.

Most companies at this stage know the pricing process is a problem. What they don't know is exactly where the gaps are or what they're costing. That's what RPM's Margin Analysis surfaces: a clear look at where the pricing system isn't keeping pace, using your own ERP data, in 30 minutes.

You can't close a gap you can't see.