Overview
Eliassen Group helped a global automotive manufacturer implement a Custom Pricing User Interface and a Custom Rules Engine to manage complex pricing within all their different business units.
The Challenge:
Pricing can be a monumental challenge for global manufacturers of multiple products. When a change is required by a single business unit in a specific area, implementation can be a complicated process. In the automotive industry, you’re not only dealing with pricing for the myriad options available but also taxes and other fees that can vary from unit-to-unit in thousands of locations.
Imagine how much more complicated it is when utilizing an antiquated computer system that was originally built to apply every change throughout the entire network.
One prestigious manufacturer of automobiles and motorbikes struggled with their one-size-fits-all model that applied business rules across the board. With their old, unmanageable legacy system, a tax levied in Canada, for example, would also be applied to products for sale in the United States.
Eventually, the manufacturer reached the point where they were maintaining millions of rows of data per month just to keep their pricing programs up to date.
The Transformation
The Eliassen Group Application Development team worked collaboratively with the client to create a Custom Pricing User Interface and a Custom Rules Engine that replaced their existing code-based business rules engine. This new solution offered greater control, accuracy, and flexibility and was easy for the various business units to manage.
The Eliassen Group team designed the custom solution using Web Services, C#, SQL Server, ASP.NET MVC, and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Then, the team migrated everything in the client’s codebase into the Custom Rules Engine. The entire process from concept to implementation took only six months.
The Transformation
Eliassen Group’s solution was ideally suited to the needs of the corporation as a whole and to the various individual business units within it. Our client reports that the organization achieved many benefits from its implementation, including some that weren’t even considered part of the initial assignment. We’ve been informed that our client now:
- Has 30+ applications plugged into the solution
- Can apply the same system to other areas, such as loyalty and collections
- Can push into this system any business area that requires
In addition, our client estimates that this solution will save them approximately $5 million in custom development over the next decade.
