Set your pricing rules before the ERP upgrade

What is changing

Many businesses are replacing ERP and quoting systems that have run for a decade or more, often alongside a merger or a cloud migration.

System integrators configure what they are given. Pricing design usually sits outside their scope.

Common signs

• The ERP project has a pricing workstream with no pricing owner.
• Current price files are being migrated as they are, special prices and all.
• Discount approval rules are held in people's heads.
• Rebates cannot be shown at the point of sale.

Where it leads if left alone

Migrating poor pricing logic locks it in. Reps work around the new system, spreadsheets return, and the investment delivers less than planned.

The decision that is hard to reverse

Configuration decisions made in the build phase are expensive to change after go-live. Product hierarchies and customer tiers, once set, shape every report for years.

What recovery costs

Reworking pricing after go-live means change requests, retesting and retraining, at a higher cost than designing it once.

What good looks like

• A product hierarchy with at least four levels, built for pricing decisions as well as reporting.
• Customer tiers with written entry and exit criteria.
• List-less-discount logic, price floors and stacking rules.
• A discount authority matrix the system enforces at quote time.
• Rebates shown at the point of sale, and the margin reports the Pricing Council will review.

What it is worth

Designed first, the system enforces good pricing from day one: approvals at quote time, floors that hold and margin reports the business can act on.

How it is treated

1. Map today's pricing logic. Document current price lists, special prices, discount rules and rebates before migration. Strategic EBIT Opportunity & Risk Diagnostic →
2. Design the target architecture. Hierarchies, tiers, floors and approval rules agreed with sales and finance. Value-Based Culture & Transformation →
3. Hand the design to the integrator. A specification the build team can configure and test against.

How Pricing Insight works

Experience

Ron Wood has worked in pricing for 30 years: first as a pricing and commercial manager in FMCG, building materials and capital equipment, and since 2007 as adviser to more than 160 businesses.

Method

Each engagement follows the same sequence: diagnose, optimise, embed. Recommendations rest on the client's own transaction data, and every figure can be traced to it.

Measurement

Results are measured against a margin baseline agreed with the client's finance team, and reported as realised, modelled or identified.

Continuity

Ron Wood leads each engagement from the first meeting to handover.

Which pricing decisions will your new system make, and who has decided them?

A first conversation establishes how this applies in your business and whether a diagnostic is warranted.

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