The Case for Pricing Management
Olin Thompson & P.J. Jakovljevic - April 3, 2006

Situational Analysis

Enterprises have long realized the importance of improving profits by curbing upstream supply chain costs, as evidenced by an increasing strategic approach to sourcing, e-procurement, and contract or spend management over the last several years. However, this broad strategic approach, including education and discipline, has not been applied on the sales side. The kind of thoughtfulness recently seen amongst well-informed and disciplined buyers and purchasing managers has been lacking when it comes to deploying information technology (IT) systems for analyzing pricing processes, pricing optimization, sales force education, and price enforcement in the downstream components of the value chain. Another major deficiency is the dearth of software providers for the management needs of the entire price lifecycle, from price setting, price optimization, and price policy management, to deal execution monitoring, analytics, and reporting...