| Abstract: | The enhanced application provides pricing data to a broad swath of users across the enterprise. |
| Keywords: | Price management, pricing management |
Symphony Metreo, Inc. this week updated its pricing intelligence application with an eye toward extending the product’s usability to a wider cast of stakeholders across the enterprise.
Vision 3.2 includes a customizable dashboard and deeper data analysis capabilities, which, Symphony said, increase a company’s visibility into its pricing processes, and decision-making. The changes are aimed at bringing pricing intelligence to multiple functions, including business analysts, product managers, sales executives, and the supply chain planners – users who regard pricing from different perspectives.
“Business functions are cross-functional, not departmental. What we’re doing is cross-functional,” Bennett Indart, vice president of marketing and business development, told Managing Automation in an interview. “With Vision, we can help companies bridge the gap across functions and get them to collaborate more.”
According to Symphony Metreo, Vision 3.2 improves visibility across product categories, regions, and salespeople, using deep root cause analysis to understand the effect of variances on future planning. The customizable dashboards let users access pricing data in whatever format they prefer. In-depth analysis summaries and charting options help users understand who the customer is, what products the customer is buying, and how to control product and price variances. The application is not pegged to any particular industry or product type and is configured based on how a company prices its products, such as list, discounting, and rebates.
For manufacturers that lack tools to collect, analyze, and share data across the enterprise, pricing is an area that is often more art than science. As the latest pricing management applications find their way onto more computer screens, manufacturing enterprises will have an opportunity to boost their profitability through better pricing decisions and eliminating process and cost inefficiencies.
“A lot of what we’re doing is to help business analysts in organizations get off spreadsheets and other disconnected data,” Indart said.
Moving analytical data off spreadsheets and into shared databases is a common goal among business intelligence application providers of all stripes. In the subsector of pricing management, Symphony Metreo competes with specialists such as Zilliant and Vendavo, according to Indart. “Pricing is pretty much a discrete discipline in most companies,” he said.
However, the pricing market is heavily focused on optimization. “The problem with focusing on optimization is that you might miss the actual problem that’s happening in the business,” Indart said. And that’s where Symphony Metreo’s Vision comes in, he adds. The company recommends that customers use its product as an “entry point” to first understand where they might be leaking money – for example, in volume tiering, discounting, or a discipline problem in the field sales force.
According to Noha Tohamy, research director at AMR, Symphony Metreo is using Vision as an “enabler” to its sales & operations planning tools. Meanwhile, she said, the price management sector is fast-growing — “just not fast enough.” There is a lot of unrealized potential, she said, noting that price optimization software tends to be very expensive. An enterprise license plus professional fees can run upward of $1 million, she said.
Indart declined to discuss Symphony Metreo’s pricing scheme for Vision 3.2.
Asked whether Vision could assist manufacturers in gaining pricing perspective on the procurement side, Indart noted that the company is looking at creating “cost waterfalls” and is working on pilots that might provide a “cross-function view to give folks on the supply side a view of what they’re paying for.”
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