Glossary of terms

Accelerator 

tools with unique functionalities and capabilities to ease and speed up deployment of Pricefx

Access Admin

an area where user management is taking place.

Account executive

a salesperson with primary day-to-day responsibility for an ongoing business relationship with a customer.

AE

Accrual

accrual/s - refers to a time-procedural process usually carried out by accounting departments to “accrue” money in the bank for payouts that are expected to be made in the future.

Adaptive Multi-Agent System

a computerized system composed of multiple interacting intelligent agents.

AMAS

Agent

An autonomous program that indefinitely loops its lifecycle of perception-decision-action. “Autonomous” means the agent decides itself what to do, when to do it, and how to do it.

AHI

artificial and human intelligence

AHI

Airline Tariff Publishing Company

a privately held corporation that engages in the collection and distribution of fare and fare-related data for the airline and travel industry

ATPCO

Analytics

one of the Pricefx functional areas where users can visualize pricing data.

Annual contract value

the average annual revenue generated from each customer contract, excluding fees

ACV

Approval Workflow 

a process of approving the quotes when the content of the quote does not fit into the defined thresholds (e.g., minimum margin). Approval workflows should be programmed in the calculation logic. There could be multiple approval workflows connected to different user groups in the Pricefx software.

Automatic upgrade

assisting Pricefx customers in maintaining their core product version that is N-1 compliant. This means that the QA environment will be updated by default to the N-1 compliant version (as Pricefx support schedule permits). After QA upgrade, then within 30 days the PROD environment will be automatically upgraded to the N-1 compliant version (as Pricefx support schedule permits).

Best &final offer

BAFO

Bill of materials

data that identifies the items or raw materials used to produce any physical thing, whether that thing is a structure or a product.

BoM

Bottom-up pricing

method in which all the costs are calculated first, and the desired profit is added to the total cost to calculate the price

Business development representatives

someone who is responsible for generating new business opportunities by qualifying leads and prospecting through existing business accounts to engage with potential buyers.

BDR

Business Intelligence Software

types of application software that collect and process large amounts of unstructured data from internal and external systems

BIS

Business Roles

 a tool to combine user roles and user groups for a certain level of access to the software.

BR

Calculable line item collection 

refers to Quote/Agreement/Rebate 

CLIC

Calculated field set

CFS

Calculation flow

CF

Calculation logic

 a common term in Pricefx that defines a particular combination of Groovy code that defines how prices are being calculated.

CL

Change request

CR

Charts

standard pricing charts available by default in Analytics within Data Analyzer.

Claim Records

a table containing the approved claims' records to be processed and paid out

Claims Types

an area where the pre-programmed types of claims calculation are displayed. The types are used to create claims with pre-defined parameters.

Cloud security alliance

CSR

Cluster

a partition's home. Used in Pfx interchangeably with  instance. A given cluster runs exactly one version of Pricefx. Any partition on that cluster is upgraded at the same time. 

Competition price

the price of a competitor ​with a similar product

Computation 

An agent which takes variables as input to compute a value that it assigns to the output variable. This is one of the concepts of the meta-model.

Condition type

formerly called Contract Term Type

CT

Configuration engineer

CE

Configuration Wizard

an area to modify different pricing setups in a simple, step-by-step way without programming knowledge.

Configure-Price-Quote

configure a price, add a quote

CPQ

Consensus Assessment Initiative Questionnaire

a downloadable spreadsheet of yes or no questions that correspond to the controls of CSA's Cloud Controls Matrix (CCM), our cybersecurity controls framework for cloud computing

CAIQ

Constraints Parameters

Constraints are threshold and target criteria. Their parameters are namely: Acceptable delta – Acceptable margin of error. Precision – Expected precision of the target.

Contract Header 

an overview of the complete contract. Currently used as Agreements and Promotions.

Contract Line item

a contract item that defines a particular type of discount, agreement, campaign. One contract can have multiple line items.

Contract Term Types

an area where the pre-programmed types of contract calculation are displayed. The term types are used to create contracts with pre-defined parameters.

Contracts 

Previously used name for Agreements and Promotions.

Coordinates

Associate dimensions (e.g. product, client) to categories (e.g. product X, client Z) to situate variables in the problem's space. This is one of the concepts of the meta-model.

Core

Pricefx term used to define the off-the- shelf capabilities (what comes with the basic subscription) along with selected accelerators in their out-of the-box form, meaning to customization or client specific set-up.

Costs (freight/transportation)

the costs to move products

Costs (product)

the cost of production (types: standard, fixed, variable, avoidable, internal transportation, internal storage)​

Criterion 

It is an agent which expresses a criticality level by reflecting their satisfaction and their importance, e.g. targets, thresholds, or mini/maximization objectives. Criteria are applied to a variable. This term is one of the concepts of the meta-model.

Cross-sell

Cross-selling is the practice of marketing additional products to existing customers, often practiced in the financial services industry.

Customer 

a table that includes customers data with a variety of attributes. Mostly used in B2B.

C

Customer Extensions

 a type of data table containing additional customer information, such as sold-to, hierarchy, etc.

CX

Customer Health Score, Product Health Score

Calculated based on the fields Revenue Trend Last 12 months and Margin Trend Last 12 months. The Revenue Health Score and Margin Health Score are set according to the Revenue and Margin monthly or quarterly change (trend) in the last 12 months ( the maximum value is 100, the minimum value is 0) 

Customer relationship manager

combination of practices, strategies and technologies that companies use to manage and analyze customer interactions and data throughout the customer lifecycle. The goal is to improve customer service relationships and assist in customer retention and drive sales growth.

CRM

Customer segment

To group customers by common characteristics, the Customer Segment is defined in configuration (Company Parameters) – a list of fields the segment consists of, e.g. customer size, region, country etc. According to values aggregated on the Customer Segment level, certain KPIs for particular customers are calculated, e.g. cross sell. 

Dashboards 

graphical user interface that provides at-a-glance views of key performance indicators relevant to a particular objective or business process.

Data Change Request

DCR

Data feed

DF

Data Load

DL

Data Source

a type of data table that includes cleansed and structured data used to build data marts.

DS

Datamart

a type of data table that includes multiple data sources and is used for analytics.

DM

Dimensions

They are what defines levers and criteria. For instance, if your levers are product prices and your criteria are margin targets per product family and customer, then your dimensions are product, product family, and customer.

Discount impact

see Margin leakage

Dissatisfaction (criterion)

How much a criterion is dissatisfied, high = bad.

Distributor price 

wholesale price in B2B​ businesses (example: manufacturer sells tyers to distributor)

DRM

data readiness methodology

DRM

EBITDA margin

Earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization

EBITDA

Electronic data interchange

a process which allows one company to send information to another company electronically rather than with paper.

EDI

Elite

The smallest group of the most influential Value Finders whose cumulated influence is greater than half of the total influence received by the Criterion Agent.

Enhancement request

previously Change Request

ER 

Enterprise resource planning

a type of software that organizations use to manage day-to-day business activities such as accounting, procurement, project management, risk management and compliance, and supply chain operations.

ERP

Environment

used sometimes in Pricefx with the meaning of instance or cluster. Instance is preferred though.

European Article Number

 is a barcode standard, a 12- or 13-digit product identification code. Each EAN uniquely identifies the product, manufacturer and its attributes.

EAN

Excel Client

a tool based on Excel macros that allow to modify and upload the data to a particular partition.

Extend

Pricefx term used to express extended configuration. This is strictly client specific and is not covered in the core capabilities.

Floor price 

the lowest price calculated on the base of profitability

Global pricing

global price setting​ that is applicable for all business units

Grace period

Once a major release date has passed and the customer’s environment has been deemed to be non-compliant with the Pricefx N-1 policy, then they will enter a Grace Period phase. During this 30-day period immediately after the major release, the customer will be encouraged to present a plan for a timely upgrade of their environment to N-1 compliance.

Graph Patterns

Simple computation graph patterns to test the system and identify some Non-Cooperative Situations. They include SISO – Single input single output, SIMO – Single input multiple outputs, MISO – Multiple input single output, MIMO – Multiple input multiple outputs, Asynchronous feedback, Phase shift, Phase interference, Cycle.

Group purchasing organization

model combines the spend of businesses from diverse industries to achieve better pricing, service levels, and account representation from suppliers.

GPO

Home

a starting page of Pricefx that displays all software functional areas. It can be customized according to user preferences.

Instance

see cluster

Impact (criterion → value finder)

It defines how much the criterion pressures the value finder, relative to other neighboring criteria.

Induced Movement (criterion → value finder)

How much the value finder has moved because of the criterion.

Influence (value finder → criterion )

Estimation of how much the criterion’s dissatisfaction has moved because of the value finder’s actions.

Influence proportion (value finder → criterion)

Weight of the value finder’s influence on the criterion, relative to the other influencing value finders.

IntegrationManager

a back-end interface that manages data transformation and uploading into the Pricefx data tables.

Live Price Grid

a type of price list with products and calculated by logic prices which should be recalculated several times per day depending on new data (e.g., competition) updates.

LPG

Local pricing

regional price setting​ that comes on top of the global pricing

Maintenance, Repair, Operations

MRO

Manual Price List

MPL

Margin

the product's price - cost​; margin is usually the key profitability indicator.

Margin Leakage

areas where the company loses money

Marketing development funds

are funds that a company provides to all its intermediaries such as dealers, distributors, and agents, so they can use them to run marketing and sales campaigns.

MDF

MAS

Multi-Agent System which performs multi-dimensional multi-criteria optimization.

Mass Update

a function that allows updating the similar value, for example, cost, in many or all existing quotes. A feature that is useful during quotes revisions and common price parameters updates.

Master Data

a term used to define key data tables essential for software functionality.

Material Pricing Group

way of grouping materials to which one wants to apply the same conditions

MPG

Messages

They are the objects used by agents to communicate with each other. Their types are: Notify Value, Notify Criticality, Notify Elite, Subscribe to Value, Set Value, Notify No Longer Critical.

Models

one of the Pricefx functional areas where users can create, run and maintain optimization models.

Models Types 

an area where the pre-programmed types of optimization approach are displayed. The types are used to create an optimization model based on the defined data and optimization target.

N-1 Compliance

Pricefx customers being no more than 1 release behind the most current major release. e.g., when Paper Plane 11.0 is released in 2023, then support will cover Bees Knees 10.x and Paper Plane 11.0.

N-1 Policy

Pricefx will officially provide support for ONLY the last 2 major releases.  In June 2023, Pricefx will begin diligently enforcing our N-1 release policy. 

N-1

Negotiation Guidance

Pricefx accelerator where a segmentation tree using a pre-defined set of attributes called segmentation levels and then provide price recommendations based on the information from the whole segment is built. The segmentation levels are usually a combination of product attributes, customer attributes, and even transaction attributes. 

Non-Cooperative Situations

The AMAS approach states that agents must be cooperative: they should seek to help each other, adopt a useful behavior, and communicate useful information in a non-ambiguous form. This is the way to ensure that local behaviors lead to an adequate global function. Some situations may prevent agents to cooperate. They are called Non-Cooperative Situations (NCSs) and are of different types depending on what is going wrong at what part of the lifecycle (e.g. conflict, uselessness, ambiguity, etc.). An agent should be able to either detect and solve NCSs or anticipate and avoid them. This documentation mentions the following types of NCSs: Computation Agent Conflict (Phase Shift), Value Finder Conflict (El Farol Bar Problem), Value Finder Unproductiveness (No Neighbor), Value Finder Incompetence (Asynchronous Feedback), Criterion Agent Conflict (Gradient Loss).

Number of Transactions

Total Transactions in a given period / Total days in a given period

Open to buy

an inventory management strategy that helps retailers calculate how many products they need to buy. This includes physical inventory on hand and in transit, as well as any outstanding orders.

OTB

Operation profit

gross profit

Optimization Engine

an area where users can define and run AI-modeled optimization.

Packaging price

the price of packaging which is counted as an extra cost​

Partition

one instance of the Pricefx software. It is accessible through the internet browser and has a distinct link and partition name. Only authorized users can log in to the particular partition.

Payout Records 

the table that contains the records of the approved rebates to be paid out to the rebate receiver.

Platform 

a service of ist own. Employees as well as customers can have an account there. It is the "admin console"of Pricefx

PlatformManager 

user interface for managing simple data uploads, choosing and deploying integration templates, and scheduling product updates

PO.AI

It is the previous name of the Optimization Engine capability. PO for Price Optimizer, AI for Artificial Intelligence.

Pocket margin

final margin (profit before taxes)​

Policy records

a table with the optimization records that have been approved to be used in other functional areas, e.g., quotes, price setting, analytics, rebates.

Price ceiling

the highest price for selling​ a product

Price Corridor

a compromise between a standardization of prices across all markets and country-specific price differentiation

Price indexes 

price variation that is market and material related​ (example: oil, grains)

Price List and Live Price Grid types

n area in Price Setting where the available types of Price lists (PL) and Live Price Grids (LPG) are stored. Usually, those types are programmed by the concrete calculation logic and used when new PL or LPG are created.

PL, LPG

Price Lists

an area in Price Setting that allows the creation of multiple tables with products and calculated prices based on calculation logic.

Price Parameters

tables that include different pricing data that affect price calculation in logic, workflows setup, etc.

Price Records

a table that includes the records for all converted into deal quotes. One row in the record table refers to each line item in the quote. This is also the format in which Pricefx exports quotes to other systems.

Price Setting 

one of the Pricefx functional areas where users can execute price list management activities.

Pricing

the act of establishing the value of a product or a service

Pricing opportunity 

see revenue below target

Problem Description File

A JSON file built from a Groovy map, describing the optimization problem, sent to the Optimization Engine.

Problem Modeling

Process of understanding the customer’s domain and requirements, and turning them into a problem description file that is fed to the Multi-Agent Optimization Engine.

Product costs

the cost of production (types: standard, fixed, variable, avoidable, internal transportation, internal storage)​

Product Extensions

type of data table containing additional product information, such as costs, competition data, etc.

Product Life Cycle

product life stages reflected mostly in sales: introduction, growth, maturity, decline

Product Master

a table that includes product data with various attributes

Profitability

business financial gain (activities that yield profit)

Purchase price

acquisition costs​ of the product that is produced somewhere else

Quality Management System

QMS

Quantity/Volume 

the amount of product sold

Quarterly business review

is a meeting with customers on a quarterly basis to review how well you're contributing to their success. They ensure customer satisfaction and keep engagements on schedule, at or under budget and on track to meet agreed-on KPIs.

QBR

Quote Header

an overview of the complete quote calculation. One quote can have only one header.

Quote Line item

a product item added to the quote with a defined quantity. One quote can have multiple line items.

Quote Types

an area in Quotes where the pre-programmed types of quote calculation are displayed. The types are used to create quotes with pre-defined parameters.

Quotes

one of the Pricefx functional areas where users can execute Configure, Price, Quote activities.

Rebate Agreement Templates 

a function allowing you to mass create many agreements at the same time, for example, do a mass upload of rebates from other systems.

Rebate Agreements

one of the Pricefx functional areas where users can create and manage rebates.

Rebate Header 

an overview of the complete rebate. One rebate can have only one header.

Rebate Line item 

a rebate item that defines a particular type of condition that should be fulfilled by another party, e.g., if you sell 10000 units, you get 3% back. One rebate can have multiple line items.

Rebate Records

a table that includes the records for all approved rebates. One row in the record table refers to each line item in the rebate. This is also the format in which Pricefx exports rebates to other systems.

Rebate Types

n area where the pre-programmed types of rebates calculation are displayed. The types are used to create rebates with pre-defined parameters.

RebateManager

name of the Pricefx capability in Pricefx core

Rebates Calculations

the area where rebates recalculation on a base of the new data from the receiver of the rebate is set up. This is needed to analyze the payout probability of the rebate.

Recommended retail price

he price that the company that makes a product says it should be sold for.

RRP

Revenue 

total income generated from sales

Revenue Below Target

Average Invoice Price = Average Unit Invoice Price for the particular Product ID and particular Customer Segment

Rollups

a type of data analysis table that allows a higher level of aggregation and displays it on different charts.

Sales and purchase agreement

SPA

Scope (element of problem description file)

Located within a space, it defines the perimeter in which the following variables and criteria exist.

Selling Opportunity

Cross Sell Opportunity + Revenue Increase

Ship and Debit Claims 

one of the Pricefx functional areas where users can create and manage ship and debit claims.

Simulations

an area in Price Setting where users can analyze the impact of some price parameters change on the final price in Price Lists and Live Price Grids.

Software as a service

a way of delivering applications over the Internet—as a service. Instead of installing and maintaining software, you simply access it via the Internet, freeing yourself from complex software and hardware management.

SaaS

Space (element of problem description file)

Defines the dimensions in which the following variables and criteria exist (i.e. a plate in the graphical norm).

Spot quote, spot price

Includes rate for shipment that needs to be expedited immediately or urgently

Stamp

Part of a message which helps track the origin of the changes that spread through the computation graph. 

Stock

inventory​ of the product

Stock-keeping unit​

A stock-keeping unit is a scannable bar code, most often seen printed on product labels

SKU

Stop Condition

Defines when Multi-Agent Optimization Engine should stop. The types of conditions are the maximum number of steps, the minimum dissatisfaction level, and the minimum entropy level. 

Target Margin 

the amount of profit expected to receive​ from a product sold

Top-down pricing 

method in which the price is calculated based on the perceived value of the product by the customer and then pushed down

Total cost of ownership

irect & indirect cost of a product segmentation

TCO

Trailing 12-months

refers to the past 12 consecutive months of a company's performance data used for reporting financial figures.

TTM

Transaction data

records of the product sales used in Analytics and for price calculations. Transactions are stored in Data Manager in Analytics.

Up- sell

sales technique that encourages customers to spend more money by purchasing an upgraded or premium version of the product they originally intended to buy.

User Acceptance testing

a phase of software development in which the software is tested in the "real world" by the intended audience or business representative.

UAT

User Groups

a tool to provide access for users to data

User Roles

provides access for users to particular software functionality.

User story

an informal, general explanation of a software feature written from the perspective of the end user or customer. The purpose of a user story is to articulate how a piece of work will deliver a particular value back to the customer. E.g. as a <type of user>, I want <goal>, so that <reason>

Value Finder 

It is an agent responsible for finding an adequate value for themselves, i.e. a value that satisfies some user-defined criteria. Typical Value Finders include list prices and discounts.

Value Finder Parameters

Settings for certain types of Value Finders. The settings include initial value, initial/minimal/maximal amplitudes, and increase/decrease coefficients.

Variable

An agent which maintains and exposes a value found in the proble

Waterfall (price)

a simple but powerful tool that identifies hidden costs, expenses and money leakages at every price level. It gives a more accurate picture of how much revenue your business is actually keeping from each transaction.

Work in progress

WIP

Workflow

a process that enables approval of the documents and can be set up for different Pricefx functional areas.

Year over year

a calculation that compares data from one time period to the year prior. Year-over-year calculations are frequently used when discussing economic or financial data.

YOY

Year to date

a term that covers the period between the beginning of the year and the current (present) date.

YTD