Oracle Advanced Pricing

Introduction:

                   Oracle Advanced Pricing supports e-business applications by providing a flexible pricing engine that executes pricing and promotional calculations for Oracle Order Management and other Oracle Applications. This application is licensed as Oracle Advanced Pricing.

                       Oracle Advanced Pricing is a rules-based application with an engine component to service the pricing requirements of Oracle applications to price customer transactions. Oracle Advanced Pricing enables you to set up pricing actions such as price lists, agreements, formulas, and modifiers that the pricing engine applies to transactions.

                  Oracle Advanced Pricing also enables you to define a set of pricing rules (and pricing controls that can be used in conjunction with the rules) to precisely govern how and when pricing actions are applied to transactions.

Pricing Components:

1. Qualifiers : Qualifiers determine who is eligible for a price or benefit. Qualifiers and qualifier groups can be linked to price lists and modifiers to define rules for who can receive a particular price, discount, promotion, or benefit. They can assign discounts and promotions to:

• Specific customers
• Customer groups
• Order types
• Order amount
• Specific customer or group of customers

2 Qualifier Groups : Qualifier groups enable you to define multiple qualifiers relationships in preparation for association with either price lists or modifiers. You can save these qualifier groups and copy them to one or more price lists and modifiers.

3 Price Lists: Price lists relate a list price to a product. (The list price is the starting price before any related discounts and adjustments are applied.) Price lists can contain one or more price list lines, price breaks, pricing attributes, qualifiers, and secondary price lists.

4 Multiple Currency Price Lists : Multiple currency price lists enables businesses that have pricing strategies based on a single price for an item in a base currency to use exchange rates or formulas to convert that price into the ordering currency. At engine run time, the pricing engine will take the currency from the order and search for a price list or price lists with base or conversion currencies matching this currency. The pricing engine converts the price from the base currency and calculates the ordering currency based upon the established conversion rules.

5 Pricing Attributes : Pricing attributes control what is being priced or modified on a price list or modifier list.

6 Modifiers : Pricing modifiers control how the pricing engine can modify the pricing requests and pricing request lines. The modifiers are:

• Discount: Reduces the price by a fixed amount or percentage or provides a new price.
• Surcharge: Increases the price by a fixed amount or percentage or provides a new price.
• Item upgrade: Replaces an ordered item with another item for the same price as the original item.
• Other item discount: Gives a price adjustment or benefit to a specified item on an order when the customer orders one or more specified items on that same order.
• Coupon: Issues a coupon as an offer of discount on other goods and services which is redeemable on a future pricing request.
• Terms substitution: Upgrades payment, shipping, and freight terms.
• Freight/Special charges: Charges for shipping and miscellaneous situations, for example, duty, handling charges, and insurance.
• Promotional goods: Adds a new item to an order and gives this item a price adjustment or benefit when the customer orders one or more specific items on the same order.
• Price break: Applies a variable discount or surcharge price adjustment to a pricing request based on the break type and condition met. You can use both point- and range-type breaks.

7 Formulas: Pricing formulas allow the pricing engine to determine item prices based on the following:

• A combination of pricing attributes and factors based on the value of a pricing attribute
• The list price on the price list line to which the formula is attached
• The list price on any specific price list line
• A numeric constant
• A customizable function
• You can also attach a formula to a modifier line for the pricing engine to use to calculate discounts.
• You can use two types of formulas:

Static: You specify the formula and execute a concurrent process which calculates absolute price values.

Dynamic: You specify the formula and the pricing engine uses the formula in its calculations each time that someone orders the product.

8 Buckets: The pricing engine may calculate different selling prices depending on how you group your discounts into buckets. Plan your cascading discounts so that you can assign discounts to buckets based on the subtotal on which each discount needs to be applied.

9 Incompatibility groups and exclusivity: Determine the pricing bands to which the various discounts and promotions belong. Determine which discounts and promotions apply on top of one another, are incompatible, or are exclusive. Analyze all discount schemes and promotions to determine the impact.

10 Attribute Mapping: Attribute mapping is the process used to pass in data (from other applications or systems) that is not seeded in the delivered product into Oracle Advanced Pricing for use in price lists, modifiers, agreements, qualifiers, and formulas.

11 Agreements: Agreements enable you to define prices, payment terms, and freight terms that you negotiated with specific customers. You can

       1. Define your agreements using customer part numbers and inventory item numbers.
       2. Revise the original terms and maintain these changes and their reasons under separate  revision numbers.
       3. Attach an already existing price list to the agreement or define new prices.
      4. Assign optional price breaks by quantity.
      5. Set effective dates for agreement terms.
      6. Set payment terms including invoice rule and accounting rule.
      7. Set freight terms including the freight carrier.
      8. Apply agreement terms to sales orders by reference agreements.

12 GSA Pricing :GSA Pricing enables you to define a GSA price list for your GSA customers. The GSA Price List actually uses the modifiers window and uses the new price. You create a discount that adjusts the base price of the item to the GSA price.