Overview of Accelerators
What Are Accelerators?
Most pricing applications are very complex and require a tremendous allocation of resources (time, money, manpower, etc.) to develop and deploy. It can literally take months before anything can be deployed, let alone provide any tangible benefits to the company. The use of Pricefx Accelerators implements our internal virtues of FAST and FLEXIBLE.
The role of the Pricefx Accelerators is to act like jumper cables to jump-start your pricing application quickly and get your pricing application running FAST. The use of these Accelerators gets our customers started very quickly with fast time-to-value implementation.
What Value Do They Provide?
What’s the most difficult part of any application implementation (pricing or otherwise)? It would have to be the architectural design, its adherence to business requirements, and ensuring that it can stand the stresses and strains of the business without failing. The design, construction, testing, and implementation can take months and comes coupled with the corresponding budget.
But, what if you could accomplish the same goals by utilizing the Pricefx values of FAST and FLEXIBLE? What if you could have pricing application components running in weeks instead of months. That is the value that our Accelerators provide. The only thing that is missing to allow them to perform their functions will be your customer, product, and transaction data.
Can it be that easy? Nobody wants a cookie-cutter, out-of-the-box solution that is rigid and requires them to mold their processes around it. This is where our FLEXIBLE attribute rides to the rescue. Our Accelerator solutions provide numerous ways that will allow you to influence their behavior without touching one single line of code.
How Do They Solve Common Pricing Challenges?
At Pricefx, we have segmented our solution into several different categories and each of these addresses very specific sets of pricing requirements. Thus, our multitude of Accelerators is also separated into these distinct groupings to focus on solving common problems in these areas.
tegory | Accelerator | Description |
|---|---|---|
Insights | Customer Insights | Assists in the prevention of margin leakages through a set of pre-built dashboards that enable you to identify customers at risk with low health scores. |
Sales Insights | Provides insights with pre-built dashboards into revenue and margins for customers and products. | |
Actionable Insights | Helps you find business opportunities or detect risks by using relevant contextual actions which are triggered by specific situations. | |
Pricefx Plasma | Compares more than 20 pricing performance benchmarks against anonymized aggregate transaction and quoting data. | |
Price Management | Price Setting | Provides range of pricing strategies to create complex price lists with lightning speed. |
Price Flexibility | Increases your ability to respond to market changes using dynamic pricing capabilities. | |
Price List Impact Simulation | Visual impact assessment tool that allows Pricing Managers to use updated list prices to simulate the potential impact of the new prices on their business. | |
Price Waterfall Optimization | Provides a fast implementation of a standard waterfall simulation. | |
Agreements Accelerator | Provides a solution for faster implementation of formula-based long-term customer agreements. | |
Rebate Management | Effectively manages your rebate agreements and recognizes margin leakage using pre-defined rebate types. | |
Quoting | Negotiation Guidance | Provides fast implementation of segmentation and computation of price elasticities by segments. |
Sales Compensation | Provides a standard process that ensures that sales compensation agreements are aligned with company goals. | |
Product Recommendation | Provides recommendations on products to add to your quotes based on how often they were bought by the customer or based on other related products/customers. | |
Optimization | Negotiation Guidance | Provides price recommendations based on product and customer data in order to quote better. |
Price Waterfall Optimization | Provides recommendations over the whole waterfall, from list prices to discounts and rebates. | |
Multifactor Elasticity | Provides forecast of sales by product and derives price elasticity. | |
Clustering | Groups customers based on similar purchase patterns. Can also regroup categories based on a metric. | |
Product Similarity | Measures how similar products are and regroups the products in groups. | |
Platform | Approval Workflow | Provides methods for control and tracking of automated approvals for key processes (quotes, rebates, price lists, etc.). |
What Are Some Typical Business Scenarios for Accelerators?
Each segment of our solution is designed to solve specific problems in common business scenarios and our Accelerators are no exception.
For example, in the Insights segment of our solution we can provide insight into these scenarios:
Sales Insights Accelerators can be used for:
Understanding the revenue and margin trends
Identifying the lowest-performing products
Determining which product line contributes the most/least toward the revenue
Determining the least performing product/product line by KPI
Analyzing low performing customers/products
Customer Insights Accelerators can be used for:
Determining customer performance by health score and revenue
Identifying pricing and selling opportunities
Determining the high and low volume products
Determining attributes of customer and product portfolio mixture
When Can Accelerators Be Used?
The Pricefx Accelerators can be deployed at various points in your pricing application development. Some Accelerators can be deployed at the inception of your project because they only require that certain data exist (i.e. customer, product, and transactional history). This scenario pertains to the Sales Insights & Customer Insights Accelerators.
Another group of Accelerators (Price Setting / Price Flexibility, Price Waterfall Optimization, Rebate Manager etc.) can be used as the cornerstone of a solution to meet your specific requirements. Once implemented, these Accelerators can be customized and modified to meet the unique requirements of an individual project. This approach allows pricing applications to be developed faster without any loss of functionality or compromising the quality of the solution.
Another utilization of our Accelerators would be as an extension of your existing pricing application. Each of these Accelerators is designed to integrate seamlessly with our core solution and allows you to extend your custom solution into other areas of the CPQ application.
How Do I Install Accelerators?
Although each Accelerator has its own unique functionality and capabilities that are linked to pricing issues they are designed to resolve, their installation and deployment are quite easy. Any of our Accelerators can be deployed to your partition using our PlatformManager product. You simply select one of them from the PlatformManager Marketplace:
Once an Accelerator has been selected, you click the Deploy button to begin the installation dialog for your partition. Within the detail of each of our Accelerators, we provide a step-by-step guide on how to perform the individual Accelerator installation.