Any business knows that to make a profit, you must first establish the correct price. A price that covers the cost of production + earns a profit. This is where technology comes in and helps manufacturers effectively adjust revenue operations for different customers to ensure profitability, sustainability, and growth. SYSPRO’s V8 new Sales Pricing Engine feature does just that.
Tech to the Rescue with Pricing Software
It seems like manufacturers are constantly facing their own set of unique challenges, like labor shortages, supply chain uncertainty, and inflation that are forecasted to remain higher than normal throughout the rest of 2023. What is sometimes missed, though, is the ripple effect of problems these challenges create. In the manufacturing industry specifically, one is the efficiency in which to manage product prices, or more accurately, the constant changing of product prices.
Luckily for SYSPRO users, the version 8 release came out with a ton of wide-ranging changes to functionality that improve how manufacturers run their businesses, including a new pricing software feature. Previously, we highlighted Embedded Analytics and the Kanban Auto Inventory Replenishment. Today we’re looking at another new, and equally as awesome, feature that impacts how manufacturers conduct their price configuration called the Sales Pricing Engine. This new functionality simplifies price management by providing SYSPRO users with a single date-driven efficient way to manage all their products’ basic pricing methods.
SYSPRO’s previous pricing software functionality was extensive. However, over the years, the configuration of prices evolved and became disorganized. SYSPRO saw this as an opportunity to improve the way the system is designed to handle pricing. Rather than avoiding or ignoring the issue, they implemented the Pricing Engine. Part of the Sales Orders module, the Pricing Engine offers flexibility to change prices and the price management process. In addition to date effectiveness, price lists can be defined for stock codes, product classes, departments, or price categories.
The Benefits
In a recent poll by Forbes, Xometry, and Zogby, nine out of 10 manufacturers (or 91%) intend to hike prices in the second half of 2023. This is good news for SYSPRO users leveraging the new Sales Pricing Engine because the benefits are clear and immediate. Manufacturers gain simple price configuration by providing just one place to configure their pricing as opposed to updating it in multiple locations. Having the system capability to apply whatever pricing method per stock code increases flexibility and provides users with better control over their product’s prices as well.
They also see major improvements in discounting by:
- configuring quantity discounts on a customer selection basis,
- arranging quantity discounts across multiple stock codes and product classes, and
- applying invoice discounts on a stock code selection basis.
All of these save manufacturers significant time, especially when updating mass price lists, and improve the entire end-to-end price management process using effective dates.
How Does This Look in the Real World?
Let’s imagine the president of the Outdoors Company notifying a manufacturer that they need to increase the pricing on several of their stock codes by 15% because the price of the material has skyrocketed. A scenario that many of us are probably familiar with. The president states the new prices are in effect from June 1, 2023, to August 1, 2023, and we need to round the price to the nearest $5.00. The new pricing will be applied to any customer in price group 1, making this segment the highest priority to get updated.
Instead of having to find all the different places the prices are, and updating each one individually, then making sure to go back before August 1st and confirm all those different places are updated again – using SYSPRO’s handy new Sales Pricing Engine, we have 5 steps all done in one place:
- Set the method to the customer under Setup Options.
- Configure a price list for the specified items under Price List Maintenance by creating a new price list for the specified items reflecting the new price increase.
- Configure the price group and rules under Price Group Maintenance.
- Assign the price group under AR Customer Setup.
- And lastly, process a sales order under the Sales Order Entry screen.
If that was a little too technical, all you need to remember is that SYSPRO’s new flexible and powerful Sales Pricing Engine streamlines the entire pricing process, and enhances how manufacturers set, adjust, and optimize product prices. Our SYSPRO team is also available to help walk you through trying out the new functionality at any time. Simplified price management, using SYSPRO’s pricing software, is key to setting, adjusting, and optimizing prices for products manufacturers sell. If you’re an existing SYSPRO customer (or if you’re considering making the move to SYSPRO) and still have questions about leveraging the new Sales Pricing Engine, reach out to us. When you can optimize your technology by combining the depth of SYSPRO’s functionality with our team of experts, you can significantly improve business operations and reach a higher ROI faster on your technology solutions.
