PROS Pricing Science - White Papers

Pricing Resources

White Papers

Pricing in the Medical, Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Industries

All facets of the healthcare industry require pricing - from the manufacturers of specialty, commodity and pharmaceutical products to the distributors that resell manufactured goods to healthcare providers and retail stores. At first glance, this might not sound very different than your typical B2B supply chain, however, important differences in the Medical, Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Industries require a different structure than typical pricing strategies.

Making Business Rules Work in Pricing Optimization
Pricing optimization, the systematic process of continuously improving prices, does not stand alone but it has to be embedded in the corporate culture. Business rules represent the way the company intends to perform its business. In practical terms, imposed on prices and metrics, they reflect a company’s preferences and strategic targets.

Increasing Sales Force Performance through Science-based Pricing Guidance at the Point-of-Sale
Sales representatives can increase their own personal performance and that of the company if they are given fact-based, scientific pricing guidance at the point-of-sale. Pricing Guidance provides exactly such information that seamlessly integrates into existing systems to maximize profitability and adoption while mitigating risks.

Science-Based Segmentation to Achieve Pricing Excellence
It is a common business practice to differentiate between customers in some meaningful way. Companies segment their customers to realize maximum value for both parties. For nearly every company in every industry, segmentation provides a significant opportunity to increase revenue and profits through better understanding of customers.

Reduced Fare Restrictions and Data Transformation
Many methods have been researched and implemented within revenue management that utilize these assumptions of product segmentation. One of these optimization methods is EMSRb. EMSRb is a widely used method within the revenue management community and has proven invaluable in both application and understandability.

PROS Integration with SAP
The PROS Pricing Solution Suite (PPSS) empowers companies to implement more dynamic and flexible pricing policies and perform more meaningful analysis of pricing performance than is possible when using SAP alone.

Price Testing
Many companies today lack visibility into what really happens after a pricing action is made. The practice of relying on anecdotes and company folklore to guide in pricing decisions leads to some of the most common pricing mistakes such as unnecessary discounting and price erosion.

Price Optimization: Improving Pricing Performance
Price optimization is the process of improving pricing performance. The objective of the optimization process most often includes multiple success criteria.

Proven Best Practices for Integrating Cash Flow Considerations into Pricing Decisions
Pricing is the most powerful profit lever that executives and managers can use to affect the profitability of their businesses.

Deposit Rate Optimization in Retail and Commercial Banks

The most profitable price optimization approaches for the financial services industry are holistic in nature, with one solution generating optimized rates and fees for loan and deposit products, as well as recommending new products to offer. This approach merges both sides of the banking business with the goal of maximizing key business metrics (most often total operating profit).

Balancing Tradeoffs with an Efficient Frontier
The concept of the efficient frontier is a sophisticated, but at the same time a very intuitive way of bringing optimal pricing recommendations for slightly varying business scenarios to the fingertips of the pricing analysts.

Integrating the PROS Pricing Suite in Microsoft’s Environment to Facilitate Business User
Adoption and Enhance Value
In this whitepaper, we outline the functionality and capabilities of the PROS Pricing Solution Suite to integrate into Microsoft environments. We identify various integration points and illustrate situations. Successful businesses can leverage strong integration using applications with which users are already familiar and generate more value from their investment in pricing systems.

Hybrid Revenue Management for the Airline Industry

Many threats exist to an airline’s revenue performance – some internal to the airline and others external. Airlines have used a number of labor-intensive and unscientific methods to combat these threats – including seat parking, force class closure and artificial demand influences. An ideal methodology, however, would be a scientific approach to forecasting and optimizing price sensitive demand.