Improving pricing performance in volume industries using the SAP Price Staging Hub by Vistex

[susanne_adam]

Introduction 

In today's wholesale distribution industry, pricing has become a crucial topic. With the rise of online marketplaces and less loyal buyers, there is increased price transparency. At the same time, growing assortments, faster vendor price updates, and the importance of customer-specific pricing have led to a high volume of pricing information. Distributors now face challenges in maintaining prices, providing accurate customer-specific pricing across all channels in a performant way, and updating prices quickly. 

Furthermore, as the web-shop gains more importance, especially in industrial wholesale, customers using the web-shop expect to see their specific prices at all stages of browsing. However, the current method of calling the ERP backend synchronously to calculate the customer price leads to high load on the ERP system and potential waiting times for web-shop users. This is particularly challenging for high-volume industries such as wholesale distribution. 

To address these issues, SAP, in partnership with Vistex, has developed the SAP Price Staging Hub. This solution, based on the Business Technology Platform (BTP), provides pre-calculated prices for high-pricing volumes across distributed landscapes. It enables businesses to define and selectively process pricing-related changes, efficiently generating current price information and distributing time-sensitive customer-specific price data. The stored price data is easily accessible and can be consumed by other applications. Both push and pull scenarios for price publishing are possible. 

 Addressed Use Cases  

SAP Price Staging Hub by Vistex is designed to address several use cases: 

1. E-commerce – highly efficient response to a large volume of simultaneous synchronous pricing requests from the web-shop for individual prices 

1. Price Catalog – efficient generation of customer price catalogs, whether through scheduled tasks or manual requests 

1. Requests from 3rd party applications – highly efficient response to significant amount of parallel synchronous pricing calls from external systems, such as pharmacy POS systems 

 Solution Overview 

SAP Price Staging Hub by Vistex is a BTP-based solution providing pre-calculated prices across distributed landscapes for very high pricing volumes.  

The solution provides businesses the ability to define and selectively process pricing-related changes, schedules and executes price calculations as needed, and stores the pre-determined prices for fast retrieval. It generates full or delta catalogs of final prices and publishes the predetermined prices to other systems. 

Solution in detail: 

Price data, business partner and material APIs deliver master data to the Price Staging Hub. Pricing procedures are replicated from SAP S/4HANA or SAP Business Suite.  

1. Population 
   Price-related master data—including customer, product and price conditions—is fed to Price Staging Hub from the pricing source-of-truth.  This may be SAP S/4HANA or SAP Business Suite or another price management solution such as SAP Data Maintenance for S/4HANA by Vistex, pricing option or SAP Extended Price Management by Vistex.  Initially, a calculation of all relevant prices is executed, and the calculated prices are stored. 
   
   
2. Detection of price changes 
   Re-determination of prices happens only when customer, product, and price conditions are changed. Price Staging Hub monitors price-related master data in the source system for changes that should trigger price re-determination. 
   
   
3. Calculation 
   Price Staging Hub executes price re-calculations where needed, based on above mentioned master data changes, on a frequent schedule—measured in minutes or hours, not daily or weekly. 
   
   
4. Price staging 
   Price Staging Hub stores the pre-determined prices and makes them readily available for: 
   - fast fetching via API (pull-scenario) by other solutions, 
   - publishing predetermined prices to other systems (push-scenario), 
   - generation of full or delta customer price catalogs.  

 Customer Value 

Implementing the SAP Price Staging Hub by Vistex offers several customer benefits. It improves the customer experience in the web-shop by showing individualized prices during browsing and in search result lists, with fast response times. It allows businesses to handle increasing transaction volumes on their web-shops over the next years. By providing current and accurate prices in real-time, it increases cart and RFQ conversion ratios. The processing times for creating and distributing customer price catalogs can be significantly reduced. 

Resources

Solution Brief – SAP Price Staging Hub by Vistex
SAP Price Staging Hub by Vistex on SAP.com