This tool will demonstrate how visual configuration can be used to develop custom pricing strategies as it operates as a standalone web application integrated into Pricefx and powered by a visual framework. The web app is an application written in Javascript/React and provides functionality such as reading, modifying and persisting data on the partition while the visual framework allows for ease of customization of the pricing components.

Strategy Designer simplifies the configuration into simple streamlined experience so the users can focus on the business process (i.e. setting a pricing strategy) instead of configuration.

Overview

The Visual Configuration capability will provide simple, streamlined and easy to understand drag and drop visual component that will allow business users to configure important aspects of their Pricefx deployment without the need for technical programming skills or understanding configuration details.

This deployment will be dependent upon one or more of the Pricefx Accelerator configuration components for a successful deployment.

This capability will actually contain two different sub-epics which are related, and both of these are requirements for successful deployment:

• Pricing Strategy Designer
  The first concrete Visual Configuration App being developed by Pricefx, and its role is for development of customized configuration of pricing strategies or modification of out-of-the-box price strategies that are deployed via the Price Setting Accelerator.

• Pricefx iFrame Integration
  Will provide the connection between Strategy Designer as an external product into Pricefx. This configuration will allow many different Pricefx capabilities to integrate with a visual configuration component.

Benefits

The following benefits can be expected using Visual Configuration capability:

• Create and modify new custom pricing strategies

  • Use pre-defined variables, product attributes and custom lookups in arithmetic and logical blocks

  • Create reusable lookup blocks for standard Pricefx master data like Product Extension, Company Parameters and Competition data.

  • Create a new custom pricing strategy based on a pre-defined template (Cost+ Percentage/Absolute) or a completely customized one

• Live preview of product’s calculated price

  • Show all calculated elements and variables which contribute to the total price (ie. custom lookups, pre-defined variables,etc)

  • Recalculate in real-time

• Multiple strategy selections are possible (ie. Add, modification and deletion)

• Ability to save your pricing strategy configurations to partition

  • Save pricing rules into Company Parameter tables

  • Deploy generated Groovy library

• Load configuration from partition

Functionality

The use of Strategy Designer and pricing configuration is performed in three steps:

Design

Here the user can design his pricing strategy using a drag & drop interface leveraging visual framework while seeing the impact of the changes in the Live Preview.

Open

Design Features:

• Create, rename and delete a strategy

  • Create a strategy from a template (Cost+ Absolute/Percentage/Selling Point)

  • Create a completely custom strategy

• Modify strategies

  • Add product attributes

  • Add PSP’s default variables (Product Cost, Base Price, …)

  • Add logic (when-then-else, and/or blocks, comparison block)

  • Add values (text, number, true/false)

  • Add arithmetic operations (+, -, ×, ÷)

  • Add custom lookups

• Define and manage custom lookups

  • Based on a product extension (similar to PXLookup function in formula language)

  • Based on a price parameter (similar to VLookup)

  • Based on competition data

    • Add filters using comparison of the data row’s attributes to any value or supported variable

    • Select highest/lowest/average competitor price

• Live Preview of the strategies and custom lookups

  • After selecting a product, the user can see:

    • the result price of the strategy

    • the values of the variables and custom lookups used in the calculation

  • The user can see a preview of the generated code

Select

In this step the user defines priorities of the strategies, basically populating the GlobalStrategySelection PP table.

Open

Select Features:

• Add, modify or delete rules

• Highlighted changes for easier orientation and instant visual feedback

• Auto-populating dimensions with valid combinations to prevent duplicate rules

Deploy

In the final step, the user can hit the Deploy button in order to deploy everything to the partition.

Deploy Features:

• Single button to deploy everything

• Output with the deployment progress

Dependencies

This version of the Strategy Designer Visual Configuration is dependent upon the following:

• Bees Knees release

• Price Setting Accelerator 2.1.3