What is a Live Price Grid

Let's begin by understanding what Live Price Grid means.  

A Live Price Grid (LPG) is used when you need to handle a large number of products with rapidly changing prices, e.g. in an e-commerce environment, where prices are recalculated every day or even several times a day – this is a direct contrast to Price Lists which are calculated only once for a fixed period.  

Like a Price List, a Live Price Grid is a collection of products to which a Pricing Scheme has been applied. 

Unlike Price Lists, Live Price Grids contain dynamic data and each row (product) in the grid can be updated at any given time (via integration). This way it is possible to manage the price of a large number of products with rapidly changing underlying data upon which the price depends through Pricing Parameters and Product Extensions. 

Live Price Grids also include auto-approval of prices and approval workflow and offer a data-rich user interface in order to allow the seller/product manager to make an informed and rapid decision.  

The system stores the last two prices, the current and previous prices, but there are solutions available to store the prices in a separate database in case you need to recover price data at a future date. 

Live Price Grid Information

So let's have a look at the information available in the system for Live Price Grids.  

Live Price Grids are located on the Price Setting Menu under Live Price Grids. So let's navigate there and have a look.  

Here you can see all the Live Price Grids that you have access to. Let's have a quick look at two different views that are possible.

Let's click on the Global Price List to begin. 

Here you see a list of the products contained within this Price Grid. You can see that if you select a specific product you have a range of options that appear down below.

The majority are the same as in a static Price List and are pretty self-explanatory, so here you'll focus on those that are specific to the product information for Live Price Grids. These are the Submit, Approve and Deny options.  

With Live Price Grids, as was mentioned earlier, each row, or product, within a Price Grid can be updated independently, but before it becomes “live” and available it needs to enter the approval workflow. To do that you need to submit it. You can do this item by item, or you can select all products and submit them together.  

Additionally, if you are an approver you can approve products here or if they do not meet the parameters set you can deny the price change.  

As on a static price list, you can also view all the product properties and identify errors or warnings per product.  

Now let's go back to the list of Price Grids and see a different view.  

This is another Live Price Grid and when we open it we can see that it has a header.

Price Grid Header

The header is something that you can select when you create a new price and has preconfigured logic or settings that presents you with some filters, charts, and graphs that provide summaries of the data within the Price Grid.  

Let's now look at Price Setting Types to start with.  

When you are ready to create a New Price Grid, you click on the New Price Grid button

Price Grid Types

And you can see that you have options. Your organization may have set up various different types of Price Grids with varying parameters and configurations, which you can find on the Price Setting > Price Setting Types Menu.  

If you navigate there you can briefly look at how these might be configured, to ensure that you know how to locate the correct Price Grid Type you need to use.  

Here you're presented with a list of different Price Setting Types. You'll find settings for both Static Price Lists and Live Price Grids.  You can easily filter in the Type column to review only Price Grids.  

The benefit of using Price Setting Types is that they are already preconfigured with much of the information that you'd otherwise need to input into a blank or default Price Grid. If you or your team are constantly setting up Price Grids with similar headers, calculations, and other settings, then creating or identifying an existing option that's similar to what you already need will save you from that manual repetitive work. Additionally, even if you select a specific type of Live Price Grid, you can still make changes to the settings as you work through the creation process.  

In the example here you have only one record and you can select it and click on Edit to reveal the settings.  

Here you can see the various options that are available if you were setting up your own price grid type and the settings for this one. Let's work our way down and see what you have.  

Starting at the top we have the Name field. This is the system identifier and you can see it contains no spaces or special characters in the text. This must be unique and is used as a key to integrating with other systems.  

The next field down, the Label is a standard text-based field and allows you to give a name to the price grid.  

Then you select if this should be available on the Price Grids or Price List menu.  

The Header Logic allows you to select which Header you wish to appear on your saved price grids. As you saw earlier this is optional, so you can leave this blank or select from the options available on the dropdown menu.  

The Default View Preferences, allow you to select from viewing preferences that are already set up in the system. This determines things like which columns are displayed, any filters that might be preferred by your organization or departments, etc… 

Pricing Logic is a set of pricing calculations pre-built to meet your organization's pricing strategy. It determines things like the optimal margin expected and other pricing parameters. If you're unsure of what these might be you may need to reach out to your System Administrators or your internal product owner for more information on how these have been configured.  

Matrix Logic is used when you need to add a secondary dimension for the Price Grid. 

In this case, if you select the first option and move to the Matric Logic Element field you can see that the additional dimensions or elements are related to the Matrix Logic selected.

However, if you select the other option in the Matrix Logic field, you can see that there are other elements to choose from, different from the previous ones.

Finally, the User Group (Edit) and User Group (View Details) allow you to select specific user groups who can view or edit this Price Grid Type.  

If you were making changes or adding a new Price Grid Type you'd hit Edit or Save, but for this example just click on Cancel and return to the list.  

Creating a Live Price Grid

And now let's go and create a new Live Price Grid. To do that you head back to the Price Setting > Live Price Grids Menu and click on the New Price Grid button.  

Let's select the default option and set it up from scratch.  

Price Grid Definitions

Here you have the definition screen where you can go through and populate your preferences.  

Let's give it a label, for example, LPG Chemicals Europe 2022. Then you can select whether or not you want a header. Let's select one.  

And then you see the option for LPG type. Here you can select either Simple or Matrix. If you select Matrix you will then have the option to add additional dimensions later. For now, you'll stick with Simple.  

Then you can select either to set a specific target date to be used in the calculations or a relative date. The target date is a fixed date that the system will use when calculating prices, whereas the relative date can be set relative to the date on which the calculation is being performed.   

E.g. setting -5 means the system will consider price parameters that are valid at the current date (= date of calculation of LPG) - 5 days.

So let's input -5.  

Then you have three options with regards to user groups.  

You can select the User Group which can edit or view the Live Price Grid, or you can select an existing LPG from which this new list will inherit the viewing and Editing Preferences.   

Copy preferences from Chemicals Price Grid. In this example, this isn't important, but when you're doing this in your own system it's important to understand what is the view and edit settings of the selected price grid you will use. 

Adding Products

And now you can select Continue to Products.  

And here you have the standard product picker used across the system. You can filter to find the products you want to add or you can use the Text Entry option and copy and paste a list of the Product IDs you want to add if you have them off the system.  

You could filter by industry and search for Chemicals and hit Enter key. 

You can see 92 rows or 92 products are available.

Now you can select them all and click on Select Filter to add only the filtered products

Price Grid Parameters

And now you have the Parameters screen and you'll continue to work through them. 

Allow Distributed Calculation, which allows the system to calculate multiple products simultaneously. This is useful when you are creating a Price Grid with a high number of products as it speeds the overall calculation up.   

Allow Column Type Change when selected will allow anyone with edit access to change a column type, so say you have a number column that has pulled through as a text column, you can edit that within the Price Grid once it's created. If you're confident in your data and columns and don’t want to allow editing then ignore this option.  

Dynamic Item Mode allows you to set the system to add products or add and remove products that meet parameters set on the Dynamic Item Filter. So on your product selection page, you added filters for Chemicals and Euros. If you were now to add additional products to your product data that were in the Chemical Industry and with a Euro Currency you can now add this as a Dynamic Item Filter and they will be dynamically added to your Price Grid without any additional manual effort.  

If you select add and remove, then any products which no longer meet your filter criteria or pricing parameters will also be removed.  

If you click on Create Filter you see the Product Picker again and you can create the filter to meet your requirements.   

The Default Pricing Logic is the calculation logic set by your organization, this determines what calculation parameters are applied to this Price Grid, so things like minimum margin expected, etc. Here you'll select Chems_LPG but you'll have your own.  

Dynamic UOM or Unit of Measure allows you to specify or select a different UOM from that specified in the product as default. If you leave this blank then the default is used.  

Dynamic Currency allows you to specify a logic result field whose currency will override the product's default currency. If left empty, the default from the product master is kept. 

Result Price – Select an element from the Pricing Logic to correspond with the Result Price. 

Auto Approve – The product will be auto-approved when the result of the selected element is not empty or 0. If no element is selected, the Result Price will never be automatically approved.  

Manual Price Expiry – If the selected element contains anything other than 0 or is empty, the previously set manual price (see later) will be erased. If no element is selected, the manual price will never be erased. 

 Finally, you have the option to create a threshold for price increases and decreases to manage the risk of errors or too large a fluctuation in the prices.   

Output Elements

Once you've completed all fields you can then move over to the right and see the Output Elements and Default Fields.  

Here you can select which elements are output to the Price Grid as well as select to hide the columns from the list and even indicate whether a change in this field triggers the approval workflow again.

The Default Fields allow you to hide the columns from your resulting price list. But if you hide them here you can add them to the view later through the field selector, so they don't disappear. This just gives you the option at creation to make the most important information visible as standard.  

For this example, leave all the selections blank as defaulted. Click on the Save button.  

And now you have the Live Price Grid created.  

Additional Options

You can now do a range of different things, you can assign it to a specific customer, you can copy it to create one with the same settings, you can click to calculate the prices, you can export it to Excel, display definitions by clicking on the Show the definitions, you can add additional products, configure, or change the parameters, see a summary, convert it to a static price list, delete it or click on Move to, to file it in a folder.  

On the left side, you can see the folders area, where you can add a new folder if you want and file all related Price Grids together.  

Until you calculate the prices the summary view and the headings won't be updated, so you leave the price grid calculating, and you can see it's in a pending state. Depending on the complexity of the calculation and the number of products, this might take a few minutes or longer to calculate.  

To see if it's ready you simply refresh and when it's done the Status updates to Ready.  

Now if you select a completed price list you can see the header, with graphs, filters, and calculation results as well as the products.  

From this page, you can now also access the Mass Edit or Mass Delete options as well as the Mass Actions which allow you to filter and make mass changes to workflow actions. Such as withdrawing, submitting, denying, or approving a range of products.