Unified Pricing Management in Dynamics 365 offers a centralized and advanced set of capabilities to efficiently manage and execute pricing strategies for both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) sales.
By centralizing pricing processes, organizations gain access to a unified set of tools within Dynamics 365 to plan, manage, execute, and review pricing strategies across all sales channels. This centralized approach provides greater control, ensuring that pricing strategies are consistently implemented as intended.
Key Features and Benefits:
- Real-Time Omnichannel Calculation: Unified Pricing Management ensures consistent price and discount execution across all channels, delivering a seamless customer experience.
- Advanced Integration Capabilities: Prebuilt APIs facilitate smooth integration with external systems, enhancing overall efficiency and adaptability.
- Rule-Based Pricing Engine: A sophisticated, rule-based engine enables businesses to address pricing complexities and quickly adapt to changing business models. Configurable price attributes offer full control over pricing strategies.
Comprehensive Pricing Management: Unified Pricing Management in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management serves as an end-to-end solution for handling pricing constructs. It empowers organizations to:
- Manage vendor and customer pricing agreements.
- Control prices, margins, discounts, and charges.
- Effectively administer rebates.
Through these features, organizations can align their pricing strategies with business objectives, ensuring flexibility and responsiveness in today’s dynamic market environment.
Use Case
To illustrate the capabilities of Unified Pricing Management in Dynamics 365, let’s use Luminaris Electronics as a reference organization. Luminaris specializes in manufacturing, distributing, and installing home electronic equipment. The company operates through two main distribution channels:
- B2C (Business-to-Consumer): Selling directly to consumers via physical stores, an e-commerce site, mobile apps, and a call center.
- B2B (Business-to-Business): Collaborating with wholesale partners, resellers, and leveraging a dedicated sales team for larger business orders.
Unified Pricing Management enables Luminaris to maintain competitive and consistent pricing across all these channels.
Pricing Attributes in Action
At Luminaris, pricing is influenced by a mix of key attributes, such as:
- Channels: Physical stores, e-commerce, or wholesale partners.
- Customer Segments: Retailers, distributors, or individual consumers.
- Product Categories: Electronics, accessories, or services.
- Order Attributes: Delivery mode (e.g., truck or air freight).
- Loyalty Programs: Special benefits for loyal customers.
Using Luminaris as an example, Unified Pricing Management demonstrates how businesses can manage and execute pricing strategies efficiently, ensuring consistency across all touchpoints. This flexibility allows Luminaris to handle promotions, discounts, or regional pricing adjustments seamlessly.
Practical Use Cases
Here are four examples of how Luminaris utilizes pricing attributes to address different scenarios:
- Customer Segment-Based Pricing:
Luminaris wants the sales price of their Techware brand speakers to vary based on the customer segment, such as retailers versus distributors. - Region and Delivery Mode-Based Pricing:
For televisions, Luminaris adjusts the sales price based on the mode of delivery (truck or air) and the customer’s region, such as the U.S. West Coast versus the East Coast. - Loyalty Discounts:
Luminaris offers a special 10% discount on televisions exclusively for loyalty program members. - Promotional Bundles:
As part of a promotion, Luminaris provides an additional HDMI cable with every television purchased.
These use cases showcase how Unified Pricing Management allows Luminaris to execute complex pricing strategies efficiently, ensuring both flexibility and scalability.
Key Pricing Attributes: Product, Customer, and Order
Luminaris has structured its pricing strategy around three main types of attributes:
- Customer Attributes:
Luminaris organizes its customer pricing hierarchy based on:- Customer Segment: Retailers, distributors, or individual consumers.
- Region: Geographic locations such as West Coast or East Coast.
- Customer Group: Grouping by wholesale partners or key accounts.
- End Customers: Specific buyers purchasing the product.
- Product Attributes:
The product pricing hierarchy is structured as follows:- Category: Broad product classifications like televisions or accessories.
- Brand: Specific brands such as Techware.
- Product: Individual products within a category or brand.
- Order Attributes:
Luminaris has defined order-based attributes, such as:- Method of Delivery: Truck or air freight, determined during order creation.
These attributes empower Luminaris to define and execute pricing strategies for prices, margins, discounts, charges, and rebates effectively.
Pricing Structure
Pricing Components and Structures in Unified Pricing Management
Unified Pricing Management in Dynamics 365 constructs pricing using a sequence of components, including price, margin, discounts, charges, and rebates. Organizations can define multiple pricing structures within a single legal entity, ensuring flexibility and adaptability to various business needs.
Price Determination Logic
The price determination logic is designed to accommodate multiple sources for pricing, ensuring that the final price is based on priority rules. The process is as follows:
- Trade Agreements: If a trade agreement exists, it serves as the primary source for pricing.
- Base Price: If no trade agreement exists, the base price is applied. This base price can be derived from:
- Purchase or standard cost of an item.
- Default price specified on the item.
Pricing Components in Detail
- Master Margin Component and Price Adjustments:
Adjustments can be applied to the price at the time of order, before discounts or charges are factored in. - Discount Types:
Pricing management supports various discount types, such as:- Simple Discounts
- Quantity Discounts
- Mix and Max Discounts
- Threshold Discounts
- Free Items
These features allow businesses to implement flexible and competitive pricing strategies.
- Charges:
Charges can be applied either at the order header level or at the order line level. The enhanced charges capability builds upon the existing functionality in Dynamics 365 by introducing features such as:- Price Attributes
- Date Ranges
- Combination Ranking
- Rebates:
Rebates can be applied based on:- Quantity
- Value
- Lump Sum (for a specific period)
The enhanced rebate management in Dynamics 365 now allows rebates to be based on price attributes, overcoming the earlier constraints of applying rebates only to specific items, groups, or all items.
Price Attributes and Groups
- Price Attributes:
Price attributes provide a flexible way to define pricing factors by leveraging:- Customer Information
- Product Information
- Sales Order Header and Lines
Extension points are also available, allowing businesses to customize and extend these attributes as needed.
- Price Groups:
Price groups enable organizations to bundle and rank attributes together, creating customized pricing strategies that can be applied effectively across components such as price, margin, and discount.
Key Enhancements
The enhanced functionality of Unified Pricing Management in Dynamics 365 introduces the following improvements:
- A robust, configurable price determination process.
- Comprehensive support for diverse discount and rebate types.
- Integration of price attributes across all pricing components for greater flexibility.
- Extension points for tailored attribute management.
Price Attributes
Price attributes are dynamic factors used to define pricing strategies. They draw from information related to customers, products, and sales orders, including details such as:
- Customer segment, region, or loyalty status.
- Product category, brand, or specific item.
- Order attributes like delivery mode or purchase date.
This flexibility allows businesses to create precise and adaptable pricing strategies, ensuring alignment with market conditions and customer needs. Additionally, extension points enable businesses to customize attributes for unique requirements.
Price Groups
Price groups allow organizations to bundle and rank multiple price attributes together, creating a cohesive and prioritized pricing strategy. By organizing price, margin, and discount components into structured groups, businesses can apply consistent pricing logic across different channels and customer types effectively.
In combination, price attributes and groups form the backbone of a flexible, scalable, and centralized pricing management system, enabling businesses to maintain competitive pricing strategies with ease.