Price Planner™ Guideline Manager™ Price Manager™ Vision™ Deal Analyzer™ Response™ Business Integration

The Price Planning Application that enables organizations to achieve their corporate targets through the creation of a “Price Plan of Record (PPOR)” and the subsequent tuning of price as results reveal themselves through the period.

The Need for Price Planning
Organizations today require greater control over their operations than in the past. The business landscape has become much more competitive especially as the economy has become more global. For many companies, managing in this increasingly unpredictable environment has become a growing challenge—where creating, managing and meeting expectations has real impact on enterprise value. Today, there is a disconnect between top-down corporate planning and performance measurement and bottom-up execution. This disconnect causes the key business drivers of price and volume to be influenced and managed differently across the various functional silos in the organization. As a result, information and assumptions behind price and volume do not propagate through the business as results reveal themselves during the period. For many businesses, this means employing ad-hoc and manual spreadsheet driven processes to connect projected performance with current execution and to create scenarios to test the tradeoffs from which to drive the business toward hitting the financial targets.

Price Planner™ connects the organization by transforming price into a valuable operational lever that companies can use to drive toward their financial goals—before and during the quarter. Price Planner accomplishes this through the creation of a Price Plan of Record (PPOR) by leveraging forward-looking demand plans, historical information (price, volume and mix), and current market demand. The PPOR becomes the objective that the business must manage toward to achieve the financial goals for the period.

Price planning connects the goals of the business with
the execution required to meet them.

The Price Plan of Record (PPOR)

Price Planner was developed with the goal of providing an interface for aligning corporate financial targets with realistic “forward-looking” price plans for the organization to execute. For this purpose, Price Planner provides the ability to develop a baseline which represents a “realistic” view of what might happen during the planning period if nothing changes. Once the baseline has been developed, Price Planner allows users to create different tradeoff scenarios in which to drive the business in order to meet the organizational objectives. The result of this scenario process is the Price Plan of Record (PPOR) which bridges the gap between the pricing asumptions required to hit the financial plan, and resulting price point that needs to be executed at the product segment level . Once created, Price Planner provides a mechanism for adjusting the PPOR during the current period to address deviations from plan as a result of product, market or environmental unpredictability.

Continuously Improving the PPOR

During the intra-cycle periods, Price Planner is the cockpit for guiding the business toward meeting the corporate financial targets. Price Planner achieves this with the following process steps:

• Identify actual performance vs. plan for period to date as well as highlight the remaining gap for goal achievement
• Create scenarios in which the user can make adjustments and test tradeoffs that evaluate the impact price and mix changes at the individual product level all the way up to the business unit operating margin level
• Select the most likely scenario, passing the updated pricing changes to the Metreo Guideline Manager for execution
• Continue to monitor and evaluate the gap through the remainder of the period

Best Practices in Price Planning

In order to proactively manage the business, there are four best practices that must be followed:

• Plan price like you plan volume - expose and align the assumptions used to drive the business by defining the contribution of each product to the plan and the business strategy
• Understand the current and projected forward gaps - what parts of the business are “off plan” based on performance to date and in future periods resulting from unanticipated changes from price realization, mix or volume at various levels of the business
• Continuously re-plan as results reveal themselves - make many small adjustments instead of taking major actions at the end of the quarter, and continuously model tradeoffs at various levels to hit the plan in the aggregate
• Propagate adjustments to the field - connect the price plan to price execution by ensuring that adjustments are delivered to the field in the form of price, discount or guideline updates

Innovative Functionality

With Price Planner, business executives can achieve their financial plan, using pricing as a lever to tune the business trajectory. Price Planner delivers this market-changing value proposition through the following innovative functionality:

• Role-based dashboards and alerts provide each user with their own view of the price planning process
• Decisionflow™ enables users to make the necessary mid-course pricing corrections for achieving the financial plan, including what-if scenario capabilities for appreciating the tradeoffs involved
• Closed-loop write-back capabilities to the underlying execution systems to ensure the efficient execution of corrective action.
• User level tailoring of displays, calculations and fields
• Advanced math and statistical processing capabilities
• Patented ActiveRules™ technology manages the business rules in complex models, enabling customers to capture all the interdependencies of the rules pertaining to their business problems

Price Planner is built to withstand the rigors of an enterprise class application environment with multi-tier processing and automatic load balancing that ensures deployments will scale to meet your organizations needs. In addition, Price Planner’s powerful J2EE compliant web user interface is designed for maximum ease-of-use.

Download the Price Planner Data Sheet

 
Price Planner™ Guideline Manager™ Price Manager™ Vision™ Deal Analyzer™ Response™ Business Integration