In a dynamic supply chain, there are many factors that make it difficult to offer a competitive price while keeping control over the profit margin. The Unified Pricing Management Module offers a solution by dynamically setting prices with characteristics of your customers, products and sales orders.
What is the Unified Pricing Management Module?
The Unified Pricing Management Module is the successor to the Pricing Management Module in D365 Supply Chain Management. Following on from the old module, it offers new functionality that helps companies manage complex pricing structures. The main change is the use of pricing rules that work with attributes defined at customer, product and or sales order level. By using attribute-based pricing rules, it is possible to personalise prices based on different characteristics of customers, products and sales orders.
Business cases for applying the new Pricing Module
For many companies, the new functionalities from the Unified Pricing Management Module will help optimise their pricing management. There are two use cases for which the new module is going to make a big difference:
Adjusting prices based on specific customer or product characteristics
Attribute-based pricing rules allow prices to be calculated dynamically for different customer segments, product characteristics and sales data. In this way, for example, generic discount rules can be established that apply a discount for the combination of customers in a specific segment and products with specific characteristics. The attributes used in the pricing strategy are highly customisable.
Working with complex discount structures
The module makes it easier to simulate discounts and make detailed price calculations. This helps prevent margin loss when combining discounts such as long-term contractual discounts and short-term promotions.
Preventing legacy software
For parties using external customised applications for their price management, the new pricing module is also a godsend. By switching to this module with standard functionality, you reduce the risk of legacy software.
How does the Unified Pricing Management Module work?
So the biggest advance in the Unified Pricing Management Module is in the way you can use data from your D365 environment to create pricing rules. For this, you use Price Components and Price Attributes.
Price components
Price components are the building blocks used to build a sales price such as base price, promotional discounts, shipping costs, etc. Each price component can have multiple price rules influenced by Price Attributes.
Price attributes
Price Attributes offer the possibility to set prices based on characteristics of the customer, product or order. You can use the standard attributes from Dynamics, but a valuable addition is that you can also create your own custom attributes. Price Attributes included in the price calculation are always linked to a product, customer or sales order.
Price Groups
With Price Groups you can group properties. This makes it easier to apply discounts to all products in a product group or customers participating in a loyalty programme.
Example
In the image below, we show in a simplified view how the characteristics (price attributes) of a phone influence the price components to arrive at the final selling price. In reality, price calculations are often more complex, where we see that the structure of the Unified Pricing Managed Module really gives more control over price management.
Summary
The Unified Pricing Management Module makes it easier to create complex pricing structures and keep a grip on price management, allowing you to build prices in a dynamic way without losing control over profit margins. The most important change is the introduction of Price Attributes, allowing product, customer and sales order attributes to be included in the price calculation. Incorporating these Price Attributes in Price Groups makes it easier to apply pricing rules to groups of customers or products.