Global printing manufacturer transforms pricing processes to gain speed, agility, consistency

Companies of all sizes and types are embracing digital transformation to drive agility, precision, and profitability. Below is the story of how one of the world’s leading OEMs of high-quality solutions and services in the graphics industry took a major step in its digital journey by transforming its global pricing processes.

Empowered by Syncron solutions, this company modernized its pricing function and can now respond more quickly to market dynamics, ensure consistency and visibility across its network, and increase returns to the business.

Challenge

  • Inefficient pricing processes and errors
  • Lack of pricing consistency rules across all business units
  • Limited ability to react quickly to evolving market dynamics.

Solution

Syncron Price is a digital solution that allows the company to:

  • Use intelligent price management.
  • Apply multiple pricing strategies.
  • Gain visibility to areas of opportunity

Results

  • Optimized pricing processes, including automated pricing.
  • Shared information across network speed reaction to market dynamics
  • Data-driven decisions enhance the overall supply chain, business results.

To support its vision to centralize and digitalize its integrated production operations, a leading industrial printing equipment provider relies on the Syncron Price solution for the management of its more than 120,000 spare parts.

The Syncron solution enables the company to use intelligent price management and apply multiple pricing strategies to define prices in line with market requirements while enhancing business results. Additionally, by increasingly relying on the analytics function in Syncron Price, the company plans to improve its processes to implement price revisions more efficiently.

Platform approach enables automated pricing

Before implementing Syncron Price, the company used Excel spreadsheets to manage pricing, which was inefficient due to the time-consuming management of data, as well as being too fragmented and prone to errors.

When looking for digital alternatives, the company faced the challenge of implementing pricing in all business areas according to the same rules. The spare parts and pricing team found an intelligent overall solution in Syncron Price. The existing pricing strategies were moved to a digital environment, allowing all business areas to leverage the same platform.

The transition to a single platform has had a major impact on the workflows within the company. The various ERP systems and the company’s web shop communicate directly with Syncron Price. The prices are changed in the system and then automatically exported back, providing significant time savings.

Before the introduction of Syncron Price, the company reviewed each part individually and assigned it to a price category, which was time-consuming and imprecise. Today, they operate based on 100 core categories and can categorize parts very quickly in Syncron Price. A huge win as it allows the pricing managers to focus on more strategic efforts.

Segmentation is the first step: from cost-plus to value-based pricing

Another distinctive advantage of implementing Syncron Price is the OEM now has the ability to support multiple different pricing strategies. For specially designed production parts, a company can use value-based pricing, which is based on the value of the product, and logical pricing based on the calculation of attributes such as weight, dimensions, or material.

The OEM can leverage this approach because not only is it a financially sound strategy that is in line with the market requirements, but it’s also what more and more customers expect from their providers. For merchandise, which is much more transactional in nature, the team offers cost-plus prices, considering the costs of manufacturing for a specific spare part plus a predefined business goal for that one part.

The ability to be more specific is achieved through intelligent segmentation of the commercially available parts according to properties and product similarities. As the market changes or parts move through different phases of the product life cycle, dynamic segments reflect changing customer needs and perceptions. In this way, the product segmentation and consequently the part’s price is based on the value that customers consider fair at the time. This has enabled the company to maintain consistent business results, even when demand declines, and make customers trust the prices being quoted as fair and accurate.

Thanks to the efficient processes and the automated processing of master data, global market prices can also be used as a reference when defining local prices. The pricing team at the company has established a global reference price (GRP). Once the prices have been centrally defined, the price lists are also sent out via Syncron software. In this way, all markets receive the currently valid prices for the 120,000 spare parts.

Intelligent analyses offer further potential

In the future, the company plans to make greater use of the Syncron Price analytics function. This module enables users to create individual dashboards and ad-hoc reports for detailed analysis. Users can identify and understand the underlying causes of price disruptions. Additionally, this functionality enables the analysis of sales and margins across the entire supply chain and identifies markets with below-average growth more quickly and reacts accordingly.

Also, the company plans to implement automatic pricing based on certain product requirements and the kit pricing strategy. With kit pricing, several parts of an assembly are sold together in a kit, which has a price advantage over purchasing individual components.

With the Syncron Price solution, the company can implement its pricing efficiently in day-to-day business while having full visibility to key metrics. The Syncron solution enables companies to create clear dashboards that display the most important pricing information at-a-glance.