Strategic Goal

To give every customer the right price in the right situation by bringing price settings, rebates, and margin analytics into one platform connected to the company’s ERP. 

Challenges

  • Pricing at scale: More than 300,000 products and a large installer customer base made it hard to set and maintain consistent, situation-specific prices.
  • Scattered price logic: Pricing rules were spread across the ERP and spreadsheets, making changes slow and hard to control.
  • Different price management for every sales division: Every company in the group had its own way of managing prices, preventing a unified overview of margin, cost, rebate etc.
  • Manual rebate management: Rebate agreements with installers were calculated and tracked manually, with limited visibility into their cost and impact.
  • Supplier Support management: Custom integration for the rebate structure where discounts from suppliers are forwarded to the installers of, for example, HVAC systems. The custom system automatically recognizes and calculates rebates towards installers, that are then paid out retrospectively or instantly deducted on the invoice.
  • Limited margin visibility: There was no single view of margins by customer, product group or channel to support pricing decisions.
  • Synergies in merger: The client wanted to merge their sales divisions across the group of companies but were prevented in obtaining meaningful synergies from such a merger, before they had a unified pricing tool.

Solution

CLARITY implemented Pricefx as the distributor’s central price management platform, integrated with its Infor M3 ERP.

  • Central price management: Implemented Pricefx as the single platform for setting and governing prices across the full product range, using modules: Integration Manager, Rebate Management, Price Analytics, Price Setting.
  • Rebate management: Configured installer rebate agreements in Pricefx, with automated calculation and tracking.
  • Pricing and margin analytics: Implemented price and margin analytics across customers, product groups and channels.
  • ERP integration: Connected Pricefx to Infor M3 through Pricefx Integration Manager, covering the transfer of prices and rebate conditions into the ERP.

Results

  • One governed price model: Prices for the full 300,000-product range are now set, approved and published from a single platform, so the same rules apply across sales divisions, customers and product groups.
  • Rebates managed: Rebate agreements are calculated and tracked in the system, giving the commercial team a live view of accruals and of what each agreement delivers.
  • Faster response to cost changes: Supplier cost and market changes flow into prices through the pricing model rather than list-by-list manual updates, so the company can react within the same pricing cycle.