Unlocking the ability to deliver 'best value' offers by optimising a pricing decisions process
Our customer is one of the leading retailers in the UK that operates a large network of stores cross-country, as well as provides a wide range of online services.
It’s vital for them to meet the demands of a rapidly changing market and consistently deliver the best value offers & deals to their customers. To achieve this, they need efficient internal processes and tools that support price change decisions in real-time across a diverse portfolio of products without compromising the overall pricing strategy and brand promise. To add even more complexity, such processes should run seamlessly across multiple departments and distribution channels and meet various requirements driven by internal & external regulations. Supporting this using a combination of disjointed internal systems and spreadsheets proved to be inefficient. This led to misalignment of internal communication, increased workload required to support manual reconciliations between systems, and last-minute changes that disrupted the operational execution.
Our customer was looking to streamline their internal workflow, provide a single source of truth for all stakeholders and utilise Anaplan’s capabilities in designing transparent and agile business processes. There were several aspects that the Anaplan solution needed to consider to deliver the expected outcomes and future proof the build in sight of the upcoming IT landscape transformation.
Firstly, the solution is designed to consolidate the planning process for all types of price changes in a single environment, with the ability to model and validate prices for different store formats and departments.
It was further required to run a series of business rules in real-time to assess the proposed commercial terms and immediately notify traders and relevant stakeholders of any potential discrepancies with the established procedures& regulations.
Another aspect of the solution design was focused on delivering a flexible functionality to set up various workflow scenarios and user roles that would be easily configurable but otherwise would run in the background providing a seamless user experience.
Finally, Anaplan needed to accommodate a robust functionality on the integration side with other IT systems providing the ability to receive large volumes of inbound data at a high-frequency, as well as generate output templates for SAP.
Fidenda conducted a series of workshops with the customer to understand the existing process, reveal its inefficiencies and identify areas where Anaplan could add significant value to optimise the workflow. Together we were able to map out the new target process that accounted for key requirements and balanced the workload between participants, providing the necessary tools to manage price changes in a timely manner.
A set of robust functional requirements and business rules was created that allowed setting clear expectations from the project, sign off the expected deliverables& working assumptions, and align the timeline with the roll-out of other IT solutions in the pipeline.
We also worked closely with the SAP implementation team to scope out the requirements for future interfaces between the systems and reflect the implications in the high-level solution architecture design.
We now look forward to working with the customer to implement the agreed process and solution design in Anaplan, coordinating our work with the Commercial and Data Engineering teams on the customer side.
