When you are finished designing your strategies, you can proceed to the next step which we call Prioritize. This is where you assign strategies to each product segment and prioritize them. It is good to have an understanding of how Strategy Importance Dependent Price List Calculations and Dependent Price Lists and Data Fallbacks work.
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This step is only accessible if all of the strategies are valid. Otherwise the Continue button will be disabled. |
User Interface Overview
Header (same as in the Design step) provides:
Status bar informing you about the save/load progress of your configuration
Interactive indicator of the current step
Deploy button which deploys the current configuration to the partition
List of Hierarchy Levels shows:
Standard Levels
Override (Base) Levels
Strategy Prioritization Table shows:
Information about the selected dependency level
Table control buttons
Add Rule button which adds new rows to the table
Revert All Changes button which reverts all changes made to the selected level
Table with product segments and prioritization
Strategy Prioritization Table
The biggest part of the screen belongs to the strategy prioritization (or importance) table. This table contains rules that determine which strategies are calculated for which product and in what order.
How Prioritization Works
Each product falls into one of the product segments, which are defined by the Price Setting Accelerator. In the example below, there are three product segments: Business Unit, Product Group, and Product Class. Each product has these attributes and therefore falls always within one segment.
In order to determine which rule applies, the product’s attributes are compared with the segment, and the rule with the most specific matching segment is chosen. For example, if we have a product with Business Unit = Food, Product Group = Beef, and Product Class = A, the last rule will be picked. If the product has Product Class = B, then the second from the bottom rule will be picked, and so on. If none of the rules applies, the topmost rule is picked as it covers all segments.
When a rule is determined, the Price Setting Accelerator calculates all the strategies in the left-to-right order.The final price of the calculation will be the price of the first strategy that returns a valid price.
In our example, say the product does not have a competition and the AvgCompetition strategy does not return a price, but the AttributeBased strategy and the My Cost Plus strategy do return one. In such a case, the final price will be the price of the AttributeBased strategy.
Controlling the Table
When editing the table, the following restrictions apply:
The product segment columns will only allow you to pick a combination that does not exist in the table. Therefore, you cannot enter duplicate data.
You cannot have a wildcard to the left of a specific value. Wildcards can be placed only to the right of the more specific values.This is the current limitation of the PSP.
In the table, you can:
Add a new rule by clicking the Add Rule button. This will add a new rule at the bottom of the table and pre-fill it with the next unused segment.
Change a rule by picking another value from the drop-down in the cell you want to change. The restrictions above apply.
Delete a rule. To do so, hover over the row which you want to delete and click the Trash icon on the right side. Such a row will be disabled and further changes will be prevented.
Revert all changes by clicking the Revert all changes button above the table. This will revert all changes you made to this table so far.
Hierarchy Levels
The items in the list of hierarchy levels are fixed and depend on how many levels you have configured in the PSP. You might have only the Default level configured, or you can have more levels. For details on how to configure this, see Dependent Price Lists and Data Fallbacks. Generally, this is configured when the PSP is deployed for the first time on the partition.
In short, you can have different settings per dependency level (or context) in which your price lists and grids are calculated. For example, you can have different settings on a Global level and Country level.
Standard vs. Override (Base) Levels
Rules defined in an Override table always take precedence over rules defined in the Standard table of the same level. Usually, the Standard tables contain rules that are not changed very frequently, and the Override tables contain rules which change a lot. An example of rules in the Override table would be a temporary promotion. Instead of rewriting your Standard Table, you can just add a rule into the Override table of the same level. If two rules with the same segment are found in both the Standard and the Override tables, the rule from the Override table takes precedence. Only if it does not return a price, the rule from the Standard table is evaluated.