The following are the capabilities of the Strategy Designer feature for the development of custom pricing strategies for your application. The overall capabilities of this feature are:
Design Panel
The main panel for Strategy Designer will appear as:
This main page is comprised of these panels; Pricing Strategies, strategy add-ons (Product Attributes, Parameters, etc), pricing calculation, Live Preview, Calculation results and Groovy code.
Pricing Strategies
One of our initial areas of interest will be the pricing strategies that are part of our pricing application and will automatically be loaded by the Strategy Designer. In the highlighted section below, we can see several pricing strategies:
NOTE: The initial list of pricing strategies that are shown will be those that are deployed as part of the Price Setting Accelerator. They are provided to you as part of the default out-of-the-box deployment of Strategy Designer.
Pricing Calculation
By selecting one of the pricing strategies on our listed of pre-built strategies, we are able to view (and edit) the formula that comprises the pricing calculation:
NOTE: Updates and modifications to our pricing strategies can be reviewed via Live Preview, but these updates aren’t active until the strategy is deployed to our application.
Pricing Calculation Add-ons
We have the ability to modify (or create) a pricing strategy using the different add-ons available. The initial default set of add-ons will come from the out-of-the-box deployment of the Price Setting Accelerator. Strategy Designer does provide the ability to create additional add-ons as needed.
These add-on capabilities are:
Product Attributes
These are the attributes from our Product master table and combine both string and numeric values. These can be used for comparisons or as part of our calculation formula.
Parameters
These are specific price parameter attributes contained in various Company Parameter tables and the out-of-the-box set are those that are defined in the Price Setting Accelerator. We have the ability to create additional Parameter entries using the Data Lookups option.
Data Lookups
Displays all of the custom look ups our Price Parameter (aka Company Parameter) or Product Extension tables. For these two categories of tables, we can build custom lookups and return specific data values.
Logic
When we are building our custom pricing strategies, we may need to utilize various conditional logic testing like; true/false boolean, Not conditions, If/Then/Else conditionals, and/or conditions, and various equivalency and comparison testing (<.>, =, etc).
Math & Values
Custom pricing strategies will require us to perform math calculations (+. *. /, etc), to do comparisons on character and numeric values.
Data Lookups
During the creation of our custom pricing strategies, we will need to be able to extract various values from our different data structures to incorporate them into our pricing calculations. The Data Lookups option within the Strategy Designer provides a visual option to perform this query function.
Data Lookup Panel
The primary panel for the Data Lookup option will contain a listing of all lookups defined, options that can be used in our lookups (attributes, parameters, etc), the lookup query and a preview of the outcome:
Data Lookups
This will be the listing of all existing and pre-defined data lookups. It allows us to save, edit, copy and delete each of our lookups.
NOTE: Since Strategy Designer is an extension of the Price Setting Accelerator, there will be three data lookups provided against price parameter, product extension and competition tables.
We can use the Add Lookup drop-down create any new data lookups against these tables:
Lookup Attributes
When creating new or custom data lookups, we can utilize some existing attributes from our Product master and our Price Parameter tables. Additionally, we can add literal and numeric values and mathematical expressions.
Data Lookup Query
We can create or edit existing data lookups and depending on the lookup type (price parameter, product extension and competition)