The Challenge

The online retailer needed to track competitor prices right away because they needed to protect their price position and prevent price cuts which would damage their profitability.

The pricing analysts conducted their work by using manual spreadsheet operations which blocked their ability to perform complete competitor market analysis.

Pain points

• Slow data prep/reporting reduced the ability to react to competitor moves.
• The system lacks a unified cockpit which enables users to focus on price management through category and SKU and competitor analysis.

Objective

The system requires an automated pricing cockpit which shows action flags that display price differences and threshold violations through various user-defined display choices.

Our Role and Approach

End-to-end analytics delivery

• The system integrates three data sources which include competitor price feeds and internal price and cost information and product organization structure through established matching criteria for equivalent products.
• The analytics model developed a KPI system which included price index and gap-to-competitor and margin guardrails and exception rules.
• The Qlik Sense application functions as an interactive cockpit system which enables users to perform drill-down operations and apply filters and receive alerts while the system runs scheduled refresh operations.
• The operating model defined which team members would respond to particular alerts while it activated an approval process and scheduled a governance assessment to take place once a week.

Key findings/ Suggestions

• The system needs elasticity signals together with promo tracking functionality to identify between permanent price adjustments and promotional deals which have time-limited validity.
• The company needs to use ‘test-and-learn’ pricing change evaluation to determine how price changes affect customer actions.

The Result

• Interactive competitive price-monitoring dashboard with automated refresh and standardized KPIs.
• Improved ability to identify price gaps, prioritize actions and track outcomes.

Quantified impact

• Reduced data-prep efforts up to 50%.
• Digital pricing excellence lifts margins by 2-7%.
• Dynamic pricing programs have been associated with sales and margin improvements of +2-5% sales growth and +5-10% margin increase.