Why move beyond spreadsheets?

If you’re in the transportation and logistics sector and still relying on Excel spreadsheets for pricing, you’re not alone. Excel has been a familiar fallback. However, as your businesses grows and pricing becomes more complex, the drawbacks become impossible to ignore.

Hence, the urgent need to digitize your quotation and pricing process is no longer optional. It’s a strategic necessity.

The implementation of a dedicated pricing system enables you to:

  • Eliminate human errors
  • Apply your price policy consistently
  • React faster to market changes
  • Scale your operations efficiently
  • Capture hidden margin opportunities

But, how do you transition effectively? What’s the best implementation strategy for your business?

Two proven approaches to pricing system implementation

When launching your pricing transformation project, you have two main paths depending on your organization’s strategic goals and  maturity.

Option 1: Automate the process, then Optimize Pricing (Pragmatic transformation)

This step-by-step approach is ideal if your short-term goal is to improve efficiency while laying the groundwork for pricing accuracy.

Phase 1: Automate core pricing processes

In this scenario, you will not focus on sophisticating your pricing rules, simply you will ensure that they are consistently applied for all cases and create one source of truth for all pricing matters, in one place. The benefits here are immediate and impactful:

  • Guide your sales representatives into applying the price policy when preparing a quote for a prospect, 
  • Be the first to submit the price to win a deal.
  • Automatically calculate the forecasted variable costs associated with the new prospect, systematically and consistently
  • Automatically enforce the governance and approval policies
  • Digitalize the renegotiation process sparing you hours of Excel computations 
  • Eradicate risks of errors.

This involves a pricing system implementation for managing “Pricing Policies,” a sophisticated “Costing Engine,” and an insightful “Performance Dashboard”. 

For the crucial task of re-pricing existing customers, effective “Rerating Campaigns” are key to maintaining flexibility and responsiveness.

Phase 2: Improve pricing accuracy

Once your processes are consistently applied, you can then strategically shift your focus to enhancing the accuracy of your pricing. Optimize the prices given to customers, based on fair and objective criteria and more granular profitability calculations.
You will achieve so by implementing solutions that will empower you to:

  • Identify and capture the full willingness-to-pay of your customers and prospects, by leveraging our Fair Price methodology
  • Increase the level of granularity of your cost model : for instance by moving from average costs to granular depot or round level costing
  • Calibrate the prices considering customer volume trend and forecasts, in order to retain the fastest growing or most profitable customers or incentivize customers with lagging volumes into growing their trade with you
  • Accurately predict the shipping behavior and profile of your prospects, so that you can finetune your rates and efficiently balance volume and profits. 

This step is designed to refine cost predictions and willingness-to-pay estimations, enabling you to capture more margin and proactively predict customer attrition. You will also concentrate on “Price Policy Alignment” and “Costing for Pricing”.

Option 2: Optimize and automate simultaneously (Holistic transformation)

This ambitious approach is for companies with well established ‘analog’ pricing and revenue management processes, who are ready to undertake a holistic digital transformation and explore a more dynamic approach to pricing.

Integrated Transformation Journey

With this option, your pricing system implementation priority encompasses both “Automate Process” and “Improve Accuracy” right from the outset. This applies across various business focuses such as “Acquire New Business,” “Re-Pricing of Existing Customers,” and “Improve Customer Retention”. You will deploy execution and analytics modules in parallel:

  • Sales tools: Quote, CRM Interface, eSignature, Billing Interface
  • Pricing cockpit: Price Policy Alignment, Costing for Pricing,
  • Fair Price (WTP), Prediction of Attrition/Churn

Dynamic Pricing capabilities

This is the ultimate stage, where your pricing system truly becomes a strategic asset, adapting your price policy to the market with monthly recommendations. The goal is to maximize capacity utilization and optimize your margin through intelligent dynamic pricing.

Solutions include:

  • Fair Price
  • Incentive agreements
  • Capacity Optimization
  • Rate Calendars

This is the fastest route to boost profitability and implement dynamic, market-responsive pricing strategies.

Which path is right for you?

Ultimately, the best path for your organization hinges on:

  • Your current readiness,
  • Available resources
  • Overarching strategic goals (e.g. quoting speed vs. margin improvement)

Regardless of the path you choose, remember that a successful implementation requires:

  • Thorough preparation
  • Robust stakeholder alignment
  • Proactively anticipating challenges
  • Meticulously addressing key areas

Then, you’ll be exceptionally well-positioned to drive significant value and achieve your pricing objectives.

Ready to Transform Your Pricing?

At Open Pricer, we support carriers and logistics providers in their journey toward digital pricing excellence. Our Business Consulting services help you:

  • Define the right strategy
  • Identify margin uplift potential
  • Implement robust pricing systems aligned with your operations

Let us help you build a pricing organization that drives revenue, reduces churn, and unlocks your full margin potential.

Contact us today to learn how Open Pricer can support your pricing transformation.

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