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Pricefx Next Gen: How Students Used Pricefx To Uncover Key Profit Drivers

April 21st, 2021 | 3 min. read

By News&Blog

How the Winners of the Simon Pricing Club Case Competition Used Pricefx To Uncover Key Profit Drivers 

Our rapidly evolving digital landscape means business students must be able think critically and adapt quickly to change. Partnerships between business, technology and academia are vital in preparing them for the challenges they’re likely to face in the real world. 

The world-class Simon Business School at the University of Rochester is dedicated to putting real-world technology into the hands of its students in order to better prepare them for careers with companies using modern, digital approaches to compete. 

That’s why Pricefx has once again partnered with the school, providing its Next Gen technology to students taking part in the annual Simon Business School Pricing Club Case Competition: 2021. Pricefx Next Gen is a program we’ve designed specifically to support the real-world applications of pricing in educational settings as our contribution to and investment in the future of pricing professionals. 

Pricefx customer nVent (a high-performance electrical company that does $2-billion in annual revenue, known for its innovation, quality and reliability, whose products empower its customers to improve performance, lower costs and reduce downtime) provided the real use case for the competition. 

On Your Marks, Get Set, OPTIMIZE! 

The competition kicked off on April 2. Participating students received access to and instructions for Pricefx’s stateoftheart SaaS platform in order to analyze and optimize pricing for nVent using our PriceAnalyzer and PriceOptimizerAI modules. 

Exercises were focused on the Thermal business at nVent (Tracer and Raychem). The students worked in teams and delivered their answers as short presentations on Friday, March 26. 

Presentations were judged byPricefx, nVent, and the Simon Business School based on the quality of recommendations (40%), depth of logic and analysis done in Pricefx (30%), and presentation and communication ability (30%). 

Congratulations to the Winners!  

Winning Team 5, the “Analysis Aces” (Deepvenus Sachdeva, Fabio Sarmiento, Dayana Cevallos, Krishna Mythili Vusulumarti and Cole Simmons) won by uncovering the key drivers for pricing in the exercise. 

They were able to determine which regions underperformed and which products had the deepest discounts, and they used that data to provide strategic recommendations. 

These included price changes for:  

  • Each of the geo-locations 
  • Threat from competitors: understanding the game 
  • Competitor pricing 
  • Non-pricing metrics like Brand image, marketing and services 
  • Substitutes and near substitutes in the market 
  • Understanding willingness to pay of customers 

Vusulumarti said he was “very impressed by the way this case competition was planned and executed” and that the key learning points were “navigating through uncertainty, being able to quickly connect the dots, [and] asking ‘why’ till we get to the root cause.”  

 

Other students commented on how many variables there were that could help develop a pricing strategy beyond the obvious price, cost, profit, margins, etc., and how important it is to get segmentation right for pricing effectively, as well as having the ability to unlock key insights on price bands in coming up with solution recommendations. 

Students were impressed by the graphical resources in Pricefx and how easy they were to interpret as an aid to understanding and visualizing the magnitude of pricing decisions. 

We’re proud to play this small part in helping to prepare the pricing professionals of our future for a world of uncertainty and rapid change, and to work alongside the prestigious Simon Business School in equipping them with the skills, experience and tools to go forward with confidence. 

News&Blog

Admin , Pricefx