Pricing Intelligence

The Problem

Pricing had grown up around people, not a process. Across hundreds of companies, that meant a different version at each.

None of it looked broken, quote by quote. It showed up quietly: margin nobody caught, or the same customer quoted two prices depending on who answered.

What We Understood First

Mapped the Old Process

Before building anything, we asked who set prices, what they used, how often it changed.

Live Cost Data, No New ERP

Supplier costs connected directly into the tools staff already used. Nothing replaced.

Market Context, Localized

Competitor prices across 5 marketplaces, adjusted to each company's own market, not one national number.

Guardrails, Not Guesses

A 25% margin floor. A cap so no price moves more than 25% at once. Prices ramp, not jump.

Tested Before Scaling

Validated against the full catalog in one pilot company before touching the wider network.

25%

Minimum margin floor

Marketplaces benchmarked live

“3-5% margin recovered, the way trust usually pays: quietly, and after the fact.”

Enterprise-scale distribution network, hundreds of local companies

What We Didn't Automate

The price stayed a human call. What we automated was the 90% of homework behind it, the manual analysis that used to eat a pricing analyst's week.

The system shows cost and market, then two pricing options, an optimal one built to win the sale, a higher aggressive one, but the rep still decides.

Tensions Worth Naming

A trusted book, gone stale.

The old price book had never obviously burned anyone. It was trusted at every company for years. The fix couldn't feel like throwing out what people knew, only replacing what sat underneath.

Inconsistent discounting.

The same customer could get two prices in the same week, no boundary either way. We built the boundary into the quote itself: room to breathe, but it can't run off a cliff.

If You're Facing This Too

At real scale, pricing can't live in one person's head. Inconsistency is the small risk. The bigger one arrives the day that person leaves, and the sense walks out with them.

Automate the information, not the decision. Give people the market and the margin room, let them decide.

What's Next

Deeper rollout, more of the catalog, and pricing wired directly into quoting and BOM, so the right number is there the moment a quote is built.

None of this needs a bigger pricing team as the network grows, the same guardrails hold whether it's one company or hundreds. And most competitors still price by feel; adjusting to each company's own local market, automatically, is the edge, not just the catch-up.

IN PERSPECTIVE

This network needed something steadier than better pricing: confidence that a price quoted this morning would still be good by the time it reached the customer, anywhere in the network.