Price management of spare parts – goodbye, Excel: How Bühler automates pricing
As featured in MaschinenMarkt | April 26, 2021 by Maximilian Schütz / Melanie Krauß
Bühler has implemented cross-departmental and automated pricing based on intelligent algorithms. This is intended to make small-scale price revisions a thing of the past in Excel.
Syncron Price enables Bühler to automate processes on price strategies and analyses on a large scale.
The pricing of spare parts is done by many manufacturing companies in an Excel environment. This is no longer the case, Bühler Group noted. The processes were too small-scale and time-consuming. “With the Excel solution, we were forced to look at every single part,” says Markus Koch, product manager at Bühler. The pricing of spare parts is an essential division of the company, where customer satisfaction also stands and falls.
In the future, the Swiss technology group wants to ensure that all business units implement pricing according to the same rules. Bühler was therefore looking for an overall solution that would transfer the existing pricing strategy into a digital environment and bring all business units to one platform. The decision was made to go with Syncron Price, by after-sales software provider, Syncron.
Save time on price revision
Syncron Price processes the data required for pricing automatically. The system uses special algorithms for this purpose. Processes of price revision are thus accelerated. For example, through efficient price equations that Bühler creates with the Equation Builder function.
“It took us several weeks to prepare for the price revision. Now a few days are enough,” explains Dovile Akuckaite, Pricing Manager at Bühler.
Syncron Price’s analytics feature also wants to make greater use of the company. Pricing Managers create their own dashboards and ad hoc reports. This is relevant for the annual price revision. Analytics generates standard reports that are used for before-and-after comparisons. As Syncron Price bundles price management processes on one platform, a high level of transparency is created across all business units.
Syncron Price features at a glance:
- Automated processing of pricing data using intelligent algorithms
- Equation Builder function automatically creates price equations and speeds up revisions
- Analytics function: create your own dashboards and ad hoc reports
- “Standard reports” for before-and-after analysis in the annual price revision
- Everything on one platform: company-wide transparency in pricing
- Competitor Pricing and Price Feedback Features
- Continuous monitoring of price developments on the market
“In the future, we are aiming for more intensive monitoring and would like to price our spare parts business on the Syncron platform,” explains Koch. And this improves customer service, which is becoming increasingly important for Bühler. “Syncron Price frees up resources at Bühler, which we use to respond more closely to the needs of different markets,” concludes Tjark de Vries, Head of Global Customer Service. “Pricing is important to provide our customers with an innovative and sustainable service offering.”
Maximilian Schütz is a freelance journalist in 56410 Montabaur
This article was originally published in the German trade publication, MaschinenMarkt, here.