In the era of globalization, companies are under pressure to deploy more dynamic pricing solutions that allow their customers to capture more business. Businesses strive for automation to enhance operational processes, improve the productivity and efficiency of the business process, and achieve a higher ROI.
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Background
ennVee partnered with a global manufacturer to customize and build a pricing generation process solution that satisfies all of the client's business requirements in the pricing domain. The core premise of our pricing solution was to have a foundation to generate and use a hierarchical price list for partners at various levels of a partnership. The customer aimed to use ennVee's custom solution to provide flexible pricing options to their partners for their entire product portfolio.
Solution Process for Customizing the Price Generation Process
The pricing transformation initiative would implement matrix distributor and partner pricing. Matrix prices will be derived as discounts off of a master price list that contains list prices.
The discount percentages will be held in a matrix pricing table and will be set based on a combination of categories including customer class, region, and pricing. Based on the manufacturer's requirements, we came up with a crafty solution approach for customizing the existing pricing functionality provided in Oracle E-Business Suite R12.
Distributor accounts will be assigned to business unit tiers based on criteria developed in the distributor initiative. These tier assignments, in conjunction with the customer class, will determine which price lists should be read when distributor orders are placed.
The price list assigned to the customer will have multiple secondary price lists that are qualified by the tiered buying group and the customer class. This will allow the price list to have secondary price lists made up of prices for all parts in a business unit. Tiers will be assigned to the customer using buying groups and the customer will have one tier assigned to it rather than individually tiered business units.
The process will generate price list lines for:
- Distributor price-lists
- All distributor-tier price lists for all customer classes are enabled for the pricing generation process and combination of business tier, region, and class code associated with the master price list on the file record
- Price Breaks, if applicable for the part
- Resale prices and Price Breaks, if applicable, and based on the resale matrix defined by the business requirement
Steps to Accomplish the Custom Business Functionality:
- We launched various custom forms and underlying tables to assign business units to pricing categories and to set up the discounts off list price for matrix pricing, suggested resale pricing, and volume break pricing.
- We created a new master concurrent program that will generate the appropriate price list lines when a part is sent for pricing (Multiple data files for multiple operating units). We also built a program to generate net cost files using the new pricing structure. The parent concurrent program wrapper code logic is designed to trigger various child concurrent program requests, which is required to accomplish the expected price generation custom functionality.
- Whenever a pricing data file is sent containing parts to be priced, users manually submit the request for the master concurrent program. Then, based on business rules and validations, price list lines and price break list lines are generated and required notifications are sent to the business user. The price generation process is used to set initial part pricing, future part pricing, and end date pricing (removing it from a price list altogether).
Outcome and Future Benefits
The solution significantly impacted the identification, analysis, and resolution of business pain areas in the pricing domain by automating and optimizing business processes, while reducing manual intervention. The new pricing strategy was successfully rolled out to all global operating units and enabled the customer to realize their business objectives and improve organizational strategic planning.
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