Price Decision Support Systems

To implement the price logic along with the entire categorisation of products and customer segmentation, an IT system is necessary that can calculate all parameters on the fly and propose an appropriate transaction price. Theoretically, this could be done in a simple Excel tool. However, the role of the IT system is broader and includes the whole system of authorisation of both access to data (we want the data of a specific group of customers to be visible only e.g. to their sales representative and its supervisor) and authorisation (such systems usually have rules and authorisation thresholds adopted and will automatically ensure that no transaction which has not obtained the required approvals is directed to execution) An important feature of such systems is also the ability to archive all offers accepted and rejected together with the parameters that were used to prepare the offer – this is extremely useful in the ex post analysis of the pricing process. Finally, the IT system is able to automatically provide up-to-date data that are useful in the context of a given decision, so that the person making the price decision can see the most important parameters at a glance without having to run separate applications or search the Internet. Modern data visualisation techniques allow such a system to prepare reports in a very clear and pictorial way, with options to delve into the most important data, which speeds up and improves the decision-making process.