Stakeholders

This use case primarily targets Pricing Analysts and Managers, with secondary relevance to Sales, Commercial, and Finance officers.

Business Context (Use Case Description) 

Open

Data Readiness 

Each customer will have unique hierarchy for customer master and product master data. The descriptions below are for reference.  It is expected that customer data will vary. The spot price dashboard is fully configurable, meaning any described piece of functionality can be customized, however, any changes will be considered custom implementations. 

Below are the most relevant pieces of information for this PDR: 

• Sales History having Pricing Date, Net Price, Margin, Revenue, Rebates, Currency, Product Id, Product Line, Product Group, Industry, Customer Id, Customer Segment, Region, and Continent 

• Forecast data having Pricing Date, Margin, Volume, Revenue, Product Id, Product Line, Customer Id, Customer Segment, Region, Continent 

Data Transformations and Orchestration 

Dashboard Filters 

The following are the filtering capabilities packaged with this PDR: 

• Customers and products selectors. 

• Start and End dates selectors. 

• Additional filters will be considered custom implementations. 

Dashboard Views and Charts 

There are 5 table views and 3 charts that are packaged with this PDR, the information available on each of them will be described next. 

Spot Business Summary Total view 

Trends % based on Quantity, Margin and Revenue forecast, it represents the delta % between the past 12 months of sales history versus the next 12 months of forecast.  

Total Revenue, Margin and Volume calculated by summing up the data over the selected period, from sales history for past dates and from forecast data for future. 

Spot Business Summary view 

Detailed version of the total view, broken down by industry, region, and product group. 

Margin Time Series bar chart 

Compares the margin % of the previous 12 months of sales history versus the next 12 months of forecast data. 

Margin, Revenue and Volume pie charts 

This analysis introduces the concept of “customer band” which is a way to bucket customers based on their contribution to the overall total as either Low, Medium, or High (L-M-H) contribution. 

Margin, volume and revenue pie charts displaying totals by customer band L-M-H. Option to drilldown to specific customers of a band should be available. Option to see details of a specific slice should also be available. 

Month Guidelines by Region and Customer Month Guidelines views 

This analysis introduces the concept of the Contribution Variable Margin (CVM), which represents the overall contribution to the variable margin of that group. 

Month Guidelines by Region: Volume, CVM, Target Margin and Actual Margin totals grouped by customer segment, product line and region. 

Views and Charts calculations 

For each table view or chart, a set of calculations are pre-packaged as per description below. 

Spot Business Summary Total view 

• Total Revenue: Total Revenue from Start Date to End Date  

• Total Volume: Total Volume from Start Date to End Date 

• Total Margin: Total Margin from Start Date to End Date 

• Revenue Trend YTD: (YTD Current year – YTD Previous year) / YTD Previous year 

• Margin Trend YTD: (YTD Current year – YTD Previous year) / YTD Previous year 

• Volume Trend YTD: (YTD Current year – YTD Previous year) / YTD Previous year 

Spot Business Summary view 

Detailed version, grouped by industry, region, product group. 

• Industry: Customer Industry 

• Region: Customer region 

• Product Group: Product group 

• Total Revenue: Total revenue from Start Date to End Date 

• Total Volume: Total Volume from Start Date to End Date 

• Total Margin: Total Margin from Start Date to End Date 

• Revenue Trend YTD: (YTD Current year – YTD Previous year) / YTD Previous year 

• Margin Trend YTD: (YTD Current year – YTD Previous year) / YTD Previous year 

• Volume Trend YTD: (YTD Current year – YTD Previous year) / YTD Previous year 

Margin Time Series bar chart 

Histogram comparing previous 12 months of sales history versus the next 12 months of forecast data. 

• Margin is calculated by month 

• Cost = revenue – Margin 

• Margin % = (revenue – cost) / revenue 

Margin, Revenue and Volume pie charts 

The calculations are the same for Revenue, Margin and Volume. Below is an example for revenue: 

• Group data by customer Id 

• Get max Revenue across customers 

• Get min Revenue across customers 

• High = max - ((max - min) / 3) 

• Low = min + ((max - min) / 3) 

• Categorize the customers into the buckets 

• Calculate total revenue 

• Calculate revenue contribution 

Month Guidelines by Region and Customer Month Guidelines views 

The Guidelines are calculated for the most recent full month. The calculation is the same for Region and Customer views: 

• Volume: Volume of the calculated month 

• Target CVM: (margin – rebates) / volume 

• Actual Margin: margin of the calculated month 

• Forecast Margin: forecast margin of the calculated month 

Personalizing the view 

Options to personalize the dashboard view should be available, covering capabilities such as resizing, reordering or hiding portlets as well as saving filtering presets to reuse the same analysis later. 

Exporting the data 

Each view or chart, as well as the whole analysis should be exportable to Excel. Specifically for charts, there should be options to export an image in multiple formats, for e.g. PNG, SVG. 

Generating action items 

This is enabled by the Actionable Insights accelerator. 

Allows using a given analysis to create watchers that will monitor the values of a target calculation and then generate action items at a certain frequency if criteria are met, or manually create an action item based on current result. 

The action item is always targeted at a specific person and its workflow runs separately from this PDR. 

Limitations and Risks

Open

 

Data formats 

Risk of data not being available in the expected format or not complete 

While many of the following can be configured with different levels of effort, for this particular use case, they are out of scope:

Metrics reporting beyond the ones mentioned 

More metrics may be available, depending on your business needs but they must be discussed priorly, in initial phases of the project, as they require additional effort .

Customizations to logics, including changes to formulas

This use cases uses out of the box capabilities and any further customization must be discussed in advance as it will be subject to effort and charge. 

Data structure changes or data transformations 

Additional filters 

Inbound or outbound integrations 

User entitlement to limit visibility over the data 

Terms and Definitions