Leveraging BPM best practices, Patni helped a leading manufacturer automate its special pricing process enabling it to price its products competitively.

The Client
The client is the leading manufacturer of wired and wireless networking products for home and small business users.

The Challenge
In its effort to drive more responsiveness among channel partners and customers, the client had initiated several "Special Pricing" initiatives. These initiatives were driven by sales channel managers who were responsible for different delivery channels and product categories. Based on market scenarios driven by competition or availability of excess inventory, the sales channel managers typically initiated special pricing requests. These requests were then routed through to respective approvers, who considered multiple variables for approving or disapproving the request. Typical variables considered were existing relationship with the customer, value of deal, potential growth of the account, level of inventory held and special scenarios such as sunsetting of specific products.

As the process of approval was manual and involved a series of steps, the client was losing out on opportunities caused due to long turnaround times. Communication too was done in an unstructured manner, with e-mail being the common mode of collaboration. Standard pricing data was fetched from a JD Edwards ERP system, pasted in an Excel sheet and routed to the respective approver.

This mode of communication was difficult to track and trace, and made it difficult for the organization to prioritize requests from an organizational perspective. There was also a lack of visibility into the number of special pricing requests making it difficult for stakeholders from other departments like finance, forecasting, and production to coordinate their activities. From a top management perspective, it was extremely difficult to collect information to analyze and improve special pricing process performance.

To address these issues, the client decided that it needed to automate and track the entire process of its special pricing initiative.

This assessment exercise called for the expertise of a service provider who had expertise in aligning the technology strategy with business needs.

The Solution
Working in close collaboration with the client, the team from Patni initially assessed the business requirements and the business processes in place. Based on the findings of the assessment, Patni partnered with the client to define, model, deploy and monitor the endto- end special pricing process using a BPM suite from Savvion.

The Patni BPM ROI framework was used to measure the tangible business benefits that could be obtained by adopting this solution. Patni was also able to leverage BPM implementation accelerators - a set of pre-built components to speed up development time. This included components typically required for a BPM implementation such as approval workflows and UIs, task scheduling algorithms, and adaptors for leading ERPs like SAP and JD Edwards.

The solution also integrated with a backend ERP for retrieving standard pricing data and enabled approvers to compare this data with the special pricing data. The solution also enabled process owners to assign tasks to specific people, and track the progress of a request through different stages. In case of pending action, the solution triggered alerts to respective people who were assigned the tasks - escalating the request to the next level till the request was resolved.

The Benefits

• Significant reduction in time taken for processing special pricing requests: As the entire process of the special pricing initiative starting from initiation to approval is automated, the client has been able to achieve a significant reduction in the time taken for processing special pricing requests Additionally, the solution allows for prioritization of special pricing requests
• Improved decision making ability: The solution offered business users visibility into running processes and ability to define and track KPIs for the special pricing process. This visibility enabled the client to improve its decision-making ability
• Enhanced Agility: The solution is flexible enough to support business process change without requiring extensive development effort
• Compliance with regulatory requirements: The solution provided audit trails and policy enforcement features that helped the client enable compliance with Sarbanes Oxley regulations.

The Technology

• BPM Suite: Savvion BusinessManager
• OS / App Server: Sun Solaris / Pramati Application Server
• Database: Oracle 9i
• ERP: JD Edwards.