Configure Attribute Based Strategy

Owned by Ondřej Tesař
Sept 30, 2024
5 min read

This article is for a technical person who wants to configure Attribute Based pricing strategy in Price Setting Accelerator.

Prerequisites

Before you start, ensure you know the following:

  • Product Attributes – You need to know which tables store the product attributes and in which fields. Such data may be in multiple tables. For example, Competitiveness attribute in a Product Master table, or Color and Size in a Product Extension table.

  • Product Anchors – You need to know which table stores the anchors for products, i.e. data defining which SKU is an anchor for another SKU. For example, they can be stored in Company Parameter “AnchorData”.

  • For parts of the business calculated by the Attribute Based pricing strategy find out the following:

    • Independent or dependent

    • Pricing Level

    • Product Segmentation

Review Data Tables

  1. Review the table with product anchors to know the field names and labels, and to know what data are in this table.

  2. Review the Company Parameters with names containing word “Attribute”. For new projects you will see several out-of-the-box tables to help you start, and in existing projects you will see if some project specific tables were defined.

  3. Review the Company Parameters with names ending with “StrategySelection”. For new projects you will see several out-of-the-box tables to help you start, and in existing projects you will see how the project was managed until now.

Define Pricing Strategy

This strategy is not predefined out-of-the-box, because it has very flexible setup, so you need to set it based on your needs.

  1. To define a new strategy, add a new record to the Company Parameter StrategyDefinition, with the following field values:

    • Name – For example “AttributeBased”. You will refer to this name later from other tables.

    • Level – Depends on your Pricing Level for which you will use the strategy, so either parent, or dependent.

    • Calculation Engine – Use the out-of-the-box “AttributeBasedEngine”.

    • Additional Engine Configuration – Name of the Company Parameter which contains configuration of anchor data. We recommend to name the table based on this pattern “{StrategyName}AdditionalConfig“, for example “AttributeBasedAdditionalConfig”.

    • Strategy Calculation Parameters – Use the list of predefined parameters, found in the section Default Strategy Calculation Parameters in the Attribute Based Engine article.

Configure Anchor Data Source

Create AdditionalConfig Table

  1. Navigate to Company Parameters, to the folder PFX Accelerator > PricingStrategiesConfig.

  2. Create a new Company Parameter table with the following settings:

    • Name – We recommend to name it based on this pattern “{StrategyName}AdditionalConfig“, for example “AttributeBasedAdditionalConfig”.

    • Valid After – From when should this setting be valid. If you are going to use it for a price list/grid with effective date (validity from) as of date X, set this field to value X-1.

    • Table Type – Matrix

    • Value Type – Matrix

    • Status – Active

  3. To configure the value field of the table, make the field “attribute1” visible, and set its Name to “parameterValue” and Label to “value”.

Link Table with Anchor Data

Your anchor data is stored in a table at a Pricefx partition. You need to set up several configuration options in the AdditionalConfig table, so that the accelerator knows where to find the table with anchor data, and which fields to use.

Example of Anchor Data storage definition

For details about the AdditionalConfig table, review section Additional Engine Configuration in the Attribute Based Engine article.

To add the configuration options, add several records to your AdditionalConfig table:

Source Type

Type of table containing the anchor data. For example “PP”.

Source Name

Name of the table. For example “AnchorData”.

Sku Field Name

Name of field containing ID of the product, for which we will define the anchor. For example “Name”.

Anchor Field Name

Name of field containing ID of an anchor product. For example “Anchor”.

Factor To Anchor Field Label

Name of field containing the factor used for calculation.

Set up Pricing Rules

To set up the pricing rules for attribute based pricing, define the following:

  1. Pricing Attribute/s, e.g. Color, Size, etc. and which tables store their values. The Pricing Attributes can be of three types: Value Based, Interval Based and Direct Value.

  2. Attribute impact to the price calculation: how much it influences the price. This step is not for all types of the pricing attributes.

  3. Calculation Pricing Rules – Calculation expression, how to calculate the price based on the attributes.

Value Based Attribute

When you define the pricing rules using the Value Based attribute, you need to set up the following:

Example of Value Based Attribute definition and usage in Pricing Rule

Interval Based Attribute

When you define the pricing rules using the Interval Based attribute, you need to set up the following:

Direct Value Attribute

When you define the pricing rules using the Direct Value attribute, you need to set up the following:

Configure Strategy

  1. Review the article Select Pricing Strategies used for Calculation of Prices.

  2. Add/modify records in the “*StrategySelection” table for the required Pricing Level and for a specific combination of the ProductSegment, for which you want to use Cost+ pricing strategy.

    • Set up the “AttributeBased” strategy for a specific Product Segment combination or on “star” level.

    • Set up the proper priority of your pricing strategy – as first, second, etc. for the Product Segment.