The Hidden Costs of Legacy Pricing in Sales Order Management
Imagine this: Your organization has been using SAP for more than a decade and has customized the system to align with the organization, who takes pride in working together to solve day-to-day issues. Among many areas and teams, you have a competent group of sales representatives, customer service personnel, and an account receivables team. They work together to swiftly address any issues with placing and processing orders because after all, no revenue/income is generated if you do not have any sales.
When we delve into this situation a bit more, a different picture emerges. Firstly, what becomes apparent is that organizations have replicated their ‘legacy’ processes into SAP. This implies the legacy pricing strategies that were designed over a decade ago are still being utilized today, which introduces unnecessary complexities, manual interventions, and inefficiencies in the process. The business has changed and grown, and the manual interventions to keep pace with that change has become part of the day-to-day.
Secondly, the sales representatives lack confidence in the pricing they see in the system when interacting with the customer. The customer service department fields calls about incorrect pricing constantly. This leads to payment delays which account receivable must ultimately deal with. Come to think of it, working together to solve day-to-day problems is recently devolved into daily and hourly firefighting to resolve pricing for customer orders.
The collective minds of sales representatives, customer service personnel, and account receivables team are fighting hard to avoid pricing errors instead of thinking of ways to simplify and modernize pricing, reduce errors, gain confidence in the data and increase customer satisfaction.
The team is struggling to understand how to phase out promotional pricing, how to handle multiple units of measure, who controls the changes to the pricing, and how to carry out the changes quickly, reliably and efficiently.
Streamline Your SAP Pricing Processes to Boost Productivity and Profitability
When pricing is incorrect in a order or invoice, some versions of the following people are involved in the resolution:
The methodology, developed by Reveal, brings the much-needed education, execution, and governance to these issues. SAP pricing is robust and can often be very complicated; discounts, surcharges, customer specific contracts, volume discounts, overrides, units of measure etc. Reveal’s oVo® Methodology focuses attention on data cleansing, removal of unused or misused system configuration, relevant education to all as to how SAP pricing works and helps to install the governance tools and key performance indicators (KPIs) needed to measure progress. Reveal does not implement the changes and leave, instead they educate your business how to make and sustain those changes yourselves.
With more modernized SAP pricing functionality, the sales representatives can again have confidence that the pricing is accurate, customer service no longer experiences delays in order processing due to pricing errors and finance will gain the confidence that the invoiced amount is correct and no longer an issue with receivables. Your business will become more agile and competitive through offering better pricing agreements with your customers. Reveal’s oVo® methodology is industry proven and can help your organization tackle the challenges you are experiencing with SAP pricing.
More information on this topic
Reveal also provides SAP video education related to this topic. Check out this must-see example: