What is Pricefx?

Pricefx is a cloud-based pricing management system. It is used to manage large quantities of prices. From pricing managers who need a centralized place to analyze and set their pricing strategies — to sales representatives who use these prices — Pricefx provides a full-stack solution.

Problem Domain

At a first glance, simply setting prices can seem trivial. However, various factors come into play to make this a daunting undertaking:

Price Setting

A company with a large set of products might want to set different prices in different counties. To also be able to swiftly respond to developments in the market, the same company will need an automated system to make quick and consistent updates of all of its prices.

Quoting

A company might not necessarily have many products, but if the products are priced per individual deal, the sheer amount of prices can be overwhelming for any one person to oversee. With each sales representative setting their own prices, how can the company ensure that they get the most out of the deals? For this, a pricing software application is needed that enables pricing managers to make decrees, and where sales representatives can receive feedback from their quotes.

Analytics

Given the sales from previous months and years, how can the company change its pricing strategies to optimize set goals such as profitability and scalability? A pricing solution can empower the pricing managers with a set of powerful dashboards and tools for querying and visualizing transactional data.

Promotions

When a company promotes a product or customer segment by setting certain discounts, how can they set these pricing conditions in a centralized place that guarantees that they will be applied to all the relevant quotes? This is only possible with an automated system.

Rebates & Incentives

Some companies will incentivize their customers by rewarding them when they reach certain spending goals. The problem arises when at the end of the contract these incentives have to be calculated and paid out.

In summary, it all boils down to optimizing efficiency, enforcing consistency, and gaining insight.

Solution Overview

To solve problems in the pricing domain, including the above-mentioned ones, Pricefx provides a range of highly customizable services.

The Pricefx backend application performs all business logic. It is headless; meaning that it is completely detached from any graphical user interface (GUI). It is also solely responsible for communicating with the database, which means that any read or write operation needs to go via one of the APIs that the backend provides.

The Pricefx Logic API enables developers to tap into the backend engine to customize business logic. Each company has its own set of products, pricing strategies, workflow schemas, and other unique needs. Therefore, the backend is agnostic to how to perform these related tasks. To enable the backend to do anything useful, software developers must program the backend with custom logic. For this purpose, the Pricefx backend provides the Pricing API. Developers write scripts in the Groovy programming language that act as hooks. This allows developers to insert their custom-made code in specific places. For example, to tell Pricefx by which method prices should be calculated, or how workflows should be built. In addition to business logic, developers can configure other aspects of the backend, such as table metadata, single sign-on, user roles, and much more.

The backend application also provides a RESTful Web API. This API is used to trigger any action within the backend. For example, to upload and query data, to create quotes and other types of documents, to initiate pricing calculations, and to access the pricing API.

The frontend application provides the means for end-users to perform all the necessary actions that they need to take in their day-to-day job. It is a web application that runs in the browser, and uses the Web API to perform all of the business logic.

Finally, any usable solution will include the means to import and export data. To calculate prices, Pricefx need access to data that originates from external systems. And for (other) external systems to be able to use the calculated prices, Pricefx needs to export it. To solve these tasks, Pricefx provides a range of tools, features, and services. The most prominent is the Integration Manager. All of these connect to Pricefx with the RESTful Web API.

Figure 1. The backend application connects to the backend and provides two APIs: 1) The Pricing API, with which developers can customize the behaviour of the backend, and 2) The Web API, with which integrations can transfer data to/from the backend, and with which the front-end application is built upon.

Summary

Pricefx offers a web application as a centralized place where users can manage large amount of prices, gain insights into existing patterns, and assist sales representatives in adhering to set pricing strategies.

Since each company has their own unique needs, each pricing solution must be customized to some extent. A solution will consist of two customized parts; the first is the custom business logic that determines the behaviour of the application, and the second is the integration setup for importing and exporting data.