Overview of Pricing Administration

This chapter gives a general overview of pricing administration for Oracle’s Siebel Pricer application, and it describes how you log on as Siebel Administrator. It also describes the processing order of price adjustments. This chapter covers the following topics:

About Pricing Administration

Siebel Pricer allows you to work with the following:

Price lists, rate lists, and cost lists. Create price lists, rate lists, and cost lists. For more information, see the following chapters:

Volume discounts. Give customers a discount if they buy in volume. For example, if a customer buys more than one hundred units, then the customer can get a 10 percent discount. For more information, see Creating Volume Discounts.
Promotion pricing. There are two types as follows:
- Aggregate discounts. Give customers a discount if they buy a group of products. For more information, see Creating Aggregate Discounts.
- Product promotions. Create promotions that can be selected in quotes, orders, and catalogs, can be tracked as assets, can have commitments tied to them, and can have rules and penalties defined for future changes. For more information, see Creating Product Promotions.

Discount matrices. Create a matrix of rules to define price adjustments. For more information, see Creating Discount Matrices.
Attribute adjustments. Create a matrix of rules to define attribute-based pricing. Attribute adjustment provides flexibility to map rules to attributes or fields in any business component. For more information, see Creating Attribute Adjustments.
Products with components. Define pricing for products whose components customers can choose. For example, when a customer buys a computer, the customer can choose to add peripherals such as a CD-ROM drive. For more information, see Setting Up Pricing for Products with Components.
Pricing reports. Create a variety of reports to track your pricing policies. For more information, see Creating Pricing Reports.
Customizing pricing logic. Pricing logic is based on pricing procedures, so it is fully configurable. For more information, see Siebel Pricer Technical Reference.

Activating Pricing Workflows

To make pricing functionality available to users, you must activate the pricing workflows. For a complete list of these workflows, see Siebel Pricer Technical Reference. For information about how to activate workflows, see Siebel Business Process Framework: Workflow Guide.

Enhancements Introduced in Siebel Pricer Version 7.8

The most important enhancements introduced in Siebel Pricer 7.8 are summarized in this topic.

Pricing Is Based on Pricing Procedures

Pricing logic is defined using pricing procedures. These procedures are based on the Product Selection and Pricing (PSP) engine. The advantage of using the PSP engine is that pricing is fully configurable. For more information about the PSP engine, see Siebel Order Management Infrastructure Guide. For information about the procedures used for pricing, see Siebel Pricer Technical Reference.

Because you can use pricing procedures to define pricing logic, pricing models and pricing factors are no longer used in Siebel Pricer version 7.8 or later.

Effective Dates for Line Items

You can set the effective dates for the line items of price lists, cost lists, discount matrices, component product price adjustments, or service prices. For more information, see Giving a Product Multiple Prices with Different Effective Dates.

Discount Matrices

Matrix-based administration of price adjustments using discount matrices is allowed. For more information, see Creating Discount Matrices.

Attribute Adjustments

You use attribute adjustments view to specify pricing for products with attributes. For more information, see Creating Attribute Adjustments.

Price Waterfalls

Call center agents and sales representatives can view a price waterfall that shows the calculations that were used to arrive at the net price that is displayed in a quote, order, or agreement. For more information, see Pricing Waterfalls.

Enhancements in Pricing for Component Products

The following pricing enhancements for component products are available:

Product versions allow you to create multiple future release versions for products.
Line item effective dates in a price list allow you to create multiple line items in a price list for a product, with different effective dates and different prices.
Every component adjustment can have an effective start and end date.

For more information, see Setting Up Pricing for Products with Components.

Volume Discount Enhancements

Volume discounts provide multiple types of price adjustments, such as percentage markup and markup amount. For more information, see Creating Volume Discounts.

Enhancements Across the Application

In addition to the features used to set up pricing, there are also many enhancements to pricing behavior in quotes and orders. For example, there is support for multiple price types and multiple currencies. For more information, see Pricing in the Run-Time Application.

About the Processing Order of Price Adjustments

The order in which price adjustments are processed can affect the final price. For example, a product costs $100 and you give a $10 promotional discount plus a 10 percent volume discount if the customer buys more than ten. If the customer qualifies for both discounts, then you can calculate the final price in two ways:

The unit cost would be $81 if the promotional discount is applied first ($100 - $10 = $90, and 10 percent off $90 is $81).
The unit cost would be $80 if the volume discount is applied first (10 percent off $100 is $90, and $90 - $10 = $80).

The pricing procedure determines the processing order of discounts, but you can customize it. For information about the default processing order, see Pricing Procedures and Workflow References.

Clearing Pricing Data from the Cache

After price list data is read from the database, it is cached in memory to improve performance. If a price list is modified, then the cached pricing data may no longer be valid.

When modified or newly developed pricing data is added to the database, the user clicks the Clear Cache button to remove cached data that may be obsolete.

The Clear Cache button is available in the Price Lists view, Volume Discount view, and many other views. In any view, it clears only the selected price list, volume discount, or other pricing data from the cache. Other pricing data remains in the cache to improve performance. For information about setting up caching, see Siebel Order Management Infrastructure Guide.

To clear pricing data from the cache

Navigate to the Administration - Pricing screen, then Price Lists view, Volume Discount view, or other appropriate view.
Select one or more Price List records, Volume Discount records, or other pricing records whose cached data may be obsolete.
Click Clear Cache.

Which Type of Promotion Pricing to Use

Siebel Pricer provides two types of promotions:

Aggregate discount promotions. These promotions allow you to give discounts to customers who buy a combination of products, as described in Creating Aggregate Discounts. You use this type of promotion to maintain promotions that were defined using bundle pricing factors in earlier versions of Siebel Pricer.
Product promotions. These promotions allow you to create many types of promotions, including bundle promotions, as described in Creating Product Promotions. This type of promotion has features such as the ability to display promotions in product catalogs and quote line items. It is recommended that you use product promotions for most new promotions.