Summary
This year’s Cross Talk retail industry event has been organized in North Carolina in Charlotte. Retailers and partners who attended the event got the chance to gather information and experiences from each other and to see what is new to the Oracle Platform and how the Retail solution portfolio evolves. One of the many interesting and insightful presentations was about the Pricing Hub that is not just one single extension but a group of modules. Currently there are three modules available for the main functional areas. Oracle said they won’t stop and there are many ideas to provide the most extensive pricing functionalities. We are excited to see other pricing related modules to come in the Pricing Hub.
Oracle Retail – Price Hub
Oracle has recently announced Strategies, Modelling and Event Planning in the Pricing Hub cloud extension. All three modules are ready-to-use for Oracle customers.
To set the appropriate Retail Prices on all locations sounds to be a difficult and time-consuming procedure. Pricing is essential to drive a successful business and it defines your market position. Retail prices are changing quite often today because of inflation, increasing margin expectations, competitors’ behaviour etc. In order to be able to react on market changes as well as to take actions that generate the most efficient Retail Prices in advance, the Oracle Pricing Hub provide customers the following options now.
Price Strategies
This Module is for Retail Price automation depending on different rules that are defined by the Retailers. Every retailer has their own pricing strategy, now they can automate how the system should react on changes in cost, margin or competitor.
Strategies that are provided by standard in the module:
- Create price change based on unit cost changes.
- Set your prices above, below or match with your competitor.
- Calculate prices based on other locations in order to differentiate prices on Area level.
- You can create your own strategies depending on your business needs.
Price Modelling
This extension focuses on manual interactions on configurable analyses that provides warnings to users to check item prices that might be wrong because items are not selling well, the margins is lower than expected, or they are just simply new items that need to reviewed again to validate that the sales price is appropriate.
There are many actions that users can take in the solution to solve the pricing issues. Create Price change, negotiate a new deal with the supplier, start a promotion or set the item on clearance.
Event Planning
The solution helps retailers to plan and manage price events throughout the whole lifecycle of the items. Price events can be price changes, promotions and clearances. You can do it manually and also you can combine it with pricing strategies. It is acting as a tool to deploy whole pricing workflows from the point when and how to select items for a price event to the point when you do the actual pricing execution. It also gives you a complete picture on all your pricing activities and timeline, linked events like POs and deals and budgets. You can track how price events perform and it gives the possibility to maintain pricing events when needed.
Conclusion
The Pricing Hub extension easily can be the gamechanger. These modules are able to provide many new possibilities that help retailers to plan, set and monitor their prices across the entire retail business. As customers become more and more price sensitive and pricing execution requires even more attention, the Oracle Pricing Hub enables you to place pricing at the center of your retail operations.