The Need for Analytics

Analytics tools are always needed for pricing purposes in companies, for example, to predict trends, understand customers, improve business performance, drive strategic decision-making and predict behavior.

Analytics helps business organizations to tackle the data and utilize it to find new opportunities, leading them to make higher profits with efficient operations and maintaining their customers happier.

Analytics provides global visibility of your business process, performance, and opportunities in real-time for timely decisions taken.

How Can Pricefx Help Your Business Analytics

Pricefx supports Analytics tools providing friendly, flexible, and advanced dashboards and charts to discover new opportunities.

Pricefx delivers some predefined dashboards and charts to display your pricing results using your master data, pricing parameters, and accelerators, which are “out-of-the-box” quick access tools.

The information displayed on the charts can be updated for simulations and “what-if” scenarios for further price setting, quoting, and rebates/discounts applications.

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Key Functionality of Analytics

Pricefx offers different tools for Analytics, which are integrated into the pricing business process.

Key functionality available:

• Data Manager helps to upload and maintain the data that is utilized for pricing Analytics. The different types of data we use include:

  • Data Feeds, which is the raw data prior to any data cleansing

  • Data Sources, cleansed and structured data used to build data marts

  • Datamarts, a combination of multiple data sources and used for analytics

  • Data Loads, task, or process that performs data cleansing or data enrichments.

Your data must be uploaded and mapped into Pricefx internal tables using the Data Feeds and Data Loads functionality. The internal tables are organized into different Data Sources to store specific types of data. For better access and use of the data, Pricefx offers Datamarts, which is like a collector of the main data from different sources in one place for easier analysis.

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• Data Analyzer function is designed to assist in the display of specific analytical results using different charts, including:

  • Bar & Line

  • Box Plot

  • Bubble

  • Heat Map

  • Histogram

  • Pie

  • Scatter

  • Time Series

  • Waterfall

• Rollups, which allow you to roll data up to a higher level of aggregation and display it on different charts

• Dashboards are a graphical summary of several charts, typically used to give an overview of a business process. Pricefx offers a large selection of predefined dashboards deployed through our Sales and Customer Insights Accelerators.

Most of the charts and dashboards in Pricefx are predefined but can be adjusted based on your business requirements. Analytics offers different choices to present the data with charts to compare, evaluate and analyze pricing results. Pricefx modules can use Datamarts to pull specific data for specific pricing purposes, you can have as many Datamarts as you need, base on your business requirements.

To see more Dashboard information, check our video tutorials for Dashboards.

Data Type Required for Analytics

Before implementing Pricefx solutions, it is recommended to validate the master data to avoid discrepancies in the pricing results.

For pricing Analytics you must provide the following data:

• Products master data (hierarchies, grouping, attributes, etc.)

• Customer master data (hierarchies, segmentation, sold-to/ship-to, etc.)

• Extensions, such as promotions, storing costs, reference data, marketing values, etc.

• Transactional data (sales/billing information)

• Forecast data (any analytical estimated values related to forecasting for sales)

• Competitor data (competitor prices, average information, etc.)

• Historical data (previous years for further estimations)

 Pricefx main window displays the Master Data icon to review all the data used in pricing Analytics.

Typical Business Applications

 Pricefx Analytics can help you to:

• Get visibility into prices, historical data, product/customer performance

• Use transactional data for the calculation and simulation of product prices and margins

• Analyze actual and simulated pricing methods

• Develop the modeling of the enterprise performance and profitability

• Get an easy and tight (meta-level) integration with MS-Excel

• Keep track of historical data, so that outdated, phased-out products or inactive customers still contribute to reporting

Analytics Charts

Charts are commonly used in companies for the easier graphical display of pricing results and further analysis.

Pricefx offers a large selection of charts for your convenience:

Bar & Line

The Bar & Line chart presents categorical data with rectangular bars with heights or lengths proportional to the values that they represent.

The Bar and Line chart is typically used to easily distinguish between two distinct but related values using a bar for one value and the line for a second value. 

For example, this chart is based on Gross Margin vs Final Base Price by Country.

To see more Bar & Line chart information, check our video tutorials for Chart Types & Their Uses.

Box Plot 

The Box Plot is a very useful chart when visualizing groups of numerical data through their quartiles.

It shows the distribution of measures over specific dimensions. The boxes represent percentile values and the “whiskers” represent the lowest/highest values to compare.

This type of chart is ideal for getting a quick overview of the spread (general view).

To see more Box Plot chart information, check our video tutorials for Chart Types & Their Uses.

Bubble

The Bubble chart is a type of chart that displays three dimensions of data.

Bubble charts can be considered a variation of the scatter plot chart, in which the data points are replaced with bubbles. This type of chart can be used instead of a Scatter chart if your data has three data series, each of which contains a set of values.

You can review the data distribution and get insights for segmentation information in the Bubble charts.

To see more Bubble chart information, check our video tutorials for Chart Types & Their Uses.

Heatmap

A Heatmap chart is a graphical representation of data where the individual values contained in a two-dimensional matrix are represented as colors. It allows you to visualize distinctive areas or values among larger sets of data.

This type of chart is very helpful to quickly spot underperformers or areas of concern.

For example, this chart is based on the Final Base Price for Product Line by Country.

To see more Heatmap chart information, check our video tutorials for Chart Types & Their Uses.

Histogram

A Histogram may appear to look the same as a Bar chart, however, the difference is in how the data is being represented. In a Histogram, the data is continuous and represents the distribution of a set of data, like Margins in this case, along an axis.

This type of chart shows the detailed distribution of a specific measure. Proper insight into the distribution might reveal additional information.

To see more Histogram chart information, check our video tutorials for Chart Types & Their Uses.

Pie

A Pie chart is a circular statistical graphic, which is divided into slices to illustrate numerical proportion.

In a Pie chart, the size of each slice is proportional to the quantity it represents. It is named for its resemblance to a pie that has been sliced.

You can get insights information from the segmentation/distribution data.

For example, this chart is based on Invoice Price by Country.

To see more Pie chart information, check our video tutorials for Chart Types & Their Uses.

Scatter

The Scatter Plot is a statistical tool used widely in process improvement work, such as Six Sigma, and it is just as relevant for improvements in the pricing world.

A Scatter plot is a type of plot diagram using Cartesian coordinates to display values for typically two variables for a set of data. Data is displayed as a collection of points, each having the value of one variable determining the position on the horizontal/vertical axis.

This type of chart is very useful for outliers and performance revision.

To see more Scatter chart information, check our video tutorials for Chart Types & Their Uses.

Time Series

A Time Series chart is simply a chart that groups values and displays the results over a selected period.

This type of chart shows the development of a measure, it could include spot seasonality.

You can use it not only for pricing-related measures but also for monitoring cost-related measures. 

To see more Time Series chart information, check our video tutorials for Chart Types & Their Uses.

Waterfall

A Waterfall chart is a form of data visualization that helps understand the cumulative effect of sequentially introduced positive or negative values. These intermediate values can either be time-based or category-based. 

In Pricing, they are predominantly category-based, with the category being a part of the overall pricing journey of a product, quote, or transaction.

These Waterfall charts are very helpful to show a buildup of the price, including all on/off-invoice discounts. It usually tells the story from the base price to the margin. But it is most commonly used for margin leakage during underperforming products/customer analysis.

To see more Waterfall chart information, check our video tutorials for Chart Types & Their Uses.

Waterfall Comparison

The Waterfall Comparison chart in Pricefx allows you to compare or benchmark the data, by Customer, Product, or Year.

You can review the difference in product groups for revenue and margin leakages.

To see more Waterfall Comparison chart information, check our video tutorials for Chart Types & Their Uses.