Strategic Pricing Associates
Enabling Highly Integrated Pricing Architecture

Every distributor requires an effective pricing strategy and the tools to ensure its implementation on a daily basis. Although there are many pricing approaches, not all are successful when it comes to solving the highly complex, yet specific pricing requirements of distributors and their sales forces. Strategic Pricing Associates, (SPA), optimizes distributors’ pricing systems to maximize profitability while maintaining competitiveness and appropriate flexibility.

Since inception in 1993, SPA has specialized in solving complex pricing challenges, with a combination of statistical analysis, process training, and sales force education. Over the years, SPA has earned the trust of leading firms across industries. Over 150 companies are running the Epicor-SPA module, across the Prophet21, Eclipse, and Prelude platforms.

“Together with Epicor, we implemented a Strategic Pricing module to bring systematic tools into our clients’ ERP systems. In this manner, Epicor customers were able to get direct access to optimized pricing tools, and their sales reps are now able to provide strategic, market-based pricing to their customers,” says David Bauders, Founder and President, Strategic Pricing Associates.

The highlight of the collaboration is the Epicor-SPA Strategic Pricing Module, which allows Epicor ERP customers to access and leverage the advanced pricing tools provided by SPA. The tools enable organizations to extract invoice transaction data from ERP systems in a standardized manner; to import optimized pricing libraries; to measure impact; and monitor utilization. These tools are seamlessly integrated directly into the associated ERP platforms, improving performance and saving valuable time and staff resources.

The Client’s transactional data are exported directly from the Epicor ERP system to SPA. SPA works with the client to segment its customers and products; and then applies its proprietary statistical tools to develop optimized pricing tools to deploy as pricing libraries. After client review and fine-tuning of these libraries, the client imports them directly into the ERP system.

For example, an Ohio based distributor faced an urgent need to solve lack of pricing consistency among its branches as well as client types.

SPA, as their choice of pricing solutions provider, facilitated consistent pricing among branches and salespeople, as well as enabled accurate pricing and better qualifying of clients.

The Epicor-SPA collaboration also allows clients to efficiently set up, maintain, organize, and monitor the strategic pricing architecture. The Epicor ERP systems contain the imported pricing libraries. “The transactional data in the Epicor ERP system can be easily exported for analysis. SPA’s resulting pricing tools are then imported directly into the existing ERP system through the Epicor-SPA Module,” says Bauders.

Pro-Forma simulation tools allow the client to test these architectures prior to making them live. Another highlight up of the program is the ability to set-up parameters for controlling pricing authority at the user level, to reduce over-rides and pricing deviations. SPA’s service pricing is tiered depending upon number of Epicor ERP users.

The invoice data in the Epicor ERP system can be easily exported for analysis and optimization. The resulting pricing architecture is then integrated directly into the ERP system through the Epicor-SPA Module

“Pricing offers huge financial benefits to distributors, yet it is difficult to master the technical and organizational challenges without experience and expertise. SPA has served over 600 companies over the last 22 years. "Our experience drives greater impact, deeper success, and more sustainable results for our clients,” says Bauders.

Looking to the future, SPA is focused on deploying additional reporting and analytical tools that are economically valuable. SPA’s clients commonly achieve impact of two to four margin points on affected revenue.