Siebel Pricing Administration Guide > Creating Discount Matrices >

About Discount Matrices

In many industries, prices and price adjustments often depend on both the product that is being sold and other information relevant to the sale. Often, customer and market conditions affect the price for which a product is sold.

Discount matrices allow you to tailor prices and adjustments to specific customer and market segments. They allow you to create and manage prices and adjustments for products in conjunction with other customer and market factors. The discount matrix administrative framework allows pricing administrators to logically group factors that result in a price or adjustment, working in the Siebel client without changing the Siebel repository.

For example, a company that sells laptop computers can create a discount matrix that allows it to charge a different price for laptops based on customer account type and sales region. In this example, customer account type, product, and sales region are the criteria for the price or discount. Therefore, the columns of the matrix would be Product, Account Type, Sales Region, Adjustment Type, Adjustment Amount, and a few additional columns that will be covered later in this chapter. Each row of the matrix defines the price or discount that will be applied when a given product is sold to a given account type in a given sales region, as shown in Table 3.

Discount matrices allow you to maintain all of this critical pricing information in a single matrix, instead of dispersing it across numerous Siebel views.

Discount matrices are recommended in cases where:

• There is a high volume of prices and adjustments.
• The criteria for prices and adjustments are known ahead of time and do not change frequently.

Because prices and adjustments are frequently stored in disparate applications, discount matrices:

• Support integration with SAP condition tables.
• Can be loaded using Enterprise Integration Manager (EIM) or Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) integration objects.
• Can be integrated with legacy applications using other XML-based integration technologies.