With global economic pressures, including tariffs, increasing regulatory challenges, and fluctuating energy prices, global companies across manufacturing, distribution, and the chemical-process manufacturing sectors are facing unprecedented supply chain complexities. For instance, manufacturers dealing with increased tariffs on imported raw materials and rising energy costsmust navigate cost pressures while maintaining competitiveness. Distributors managing disrupted supply chains due to port strikes or regulatory changes need agile pricing strategies to stay profitable. Similarly, chemical companies grappling with rising raw material costs and evolving environmental regulations must optimize pricing to sustain margins.

Investing in advanced, cloud-native pricing software like Pricefx has become crucial under conditions like these.

By leveraging AI-powered pricing solutions, businesses can:

• Enhance Decision-Making: Utilize predictive analytics to forecast market trends and adjust prices dynamically, ensuring competitive positioning.
• Unlock Margin Opportunities: Integrate pricing strategies by optimizing proactiveness to the supply chain and leverage margin opportunities with quality forecasting and price elasticity information.
• Increase Profitability: Implement AI to analyze customer behavior and tailor prices, maximizing revenue opportunities.
• Ensure Compliance Excellence: Use AI to ensure your operations are automatically running in compliance with your business guidelines, eliminating effort of governance control and giving full transparency.
• Drive Growth: Employ generative AI to innovate product offerings and explore new market segments, fueling expansion.

But for now, let's take a deep dive into the top 6 reasons why your company needs to invest in pricing software right now.

(Spoiler Alert: Number 6 can help you fund the costs of the digital transformation required – read on!)

1. Navigating Tariffs and Trade Policies

In 2025, businesses are increasingly faced with fluctuating tariffs and evolving trade policies that can significantly impact pricing strategies. The imposition of tariffs on imported goods can lead to increased costs for companies relying on foreign suppliers.

While tariffs directly increase material costs, they also disrupt supply networks, particularly in the North American and European environments (where products can sometimes make multiple border crossings).

As a result, tariffs are already creating situations that require businesses to create entirely new supply chains for raw materials from scratch in some cases, necessitating AI-driven pricing software to model complex price impacts and enable dynamic adjustments for companies to maintain their margins and profitability.

To learn more about dealing with tariffs in your business, check out this great article from my Pricefx colleague, Michelle Duffy: Navigating Tariff Pass-Through in Pricing: Speed, Accuracy, and Strategy

2. Addressing Supply Chain Disruptions

In addition to the sudden impact of tariffs, in the aftermath of global events such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing effects of conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, it has further highlighted vulnerabilities within supply chains.

Disruptions caused by geopolitical tensions, natural disasters, or pandemics necessitate a more agile approach to pricing. Pricing software enables companies to respond swiftly to supply chain fluctuations by providing insights into cost structures and market demand and utilizing predictive analytics to forecast market trends and adjust prices dynmaically, ensuring competitive positioning. This adaptability is crucial for maintaining customer satisfaction and market share during unpredictable times.

3. Managing Product Complexities for Large Scale Enterprises

As enterprises expand their product lines and diversify offerings, managing pricing across multiple products becomes increasingly complex. Large-scale businesses often deal with a range of factors influencing product prices, including production costs, competitor pricing, and customer preferences.

Moreover, manufacturers in the US, EU, and Australia with extensive product portfolios face challenges in balancing diverse product lines against varying regional regulations and market demands. Pricing software aids in developing strategies that account for the vagueries of local taxes and tariffs, applies AI-driven optimization, and ensures transparency across all business units. Additionally, it streamlines the deployment of pricing strategies within complex systems, often hindered by heterogeneous CRMs and ERPs, enabling faster and more efficient pricing adjustments.

Advanced pricing software utilizes actionable insights formulated by the analysis of vast amounts of data, helping companies optimize prices based on real-time market conditions and internal cost structures. This capability allows enterprises to streamline their pricing processes and enhance overall efficiency.

4. Setting Prices For New Products - A Shift from Passive to Active Price Setting

SaaS pricing software is invaluable for manufacturers, distributors and chemical companies transitioning to active price setting. It embeds pricing expertise directly into the organization, making high-level knowledge accessible to all. This democratization of pricing knowledge ensures that everyone involved can contribute to finding the optimal market price.

The software streamlines complex pricing processes by centralizing necessary data, such as bill of material costs and competitive positioning. For example, Pricefx's Product Similarity Accelerator provides a similarity score between products and regroups them into similar groups which can then be leveraged to apply a pricing strategy aligned to any’s company’s unique set of business objectives.

This allows for accurate pricing with minimal effort and increased customer focus, even in changing market conditions or product development phases.

Additionally, pricing software offers a comprehensive perspective on pricing by supporting multiple factors and complex cost structures. This approach aids strategies like value-based pricing, which justifies a product's worth beyond its price tag, and dynamic pricing models that require real-time data and intricate algorithms.

5. Facilitating the Negotiation of Long-Term Contracts

In an environment where long-term contracts are becoming more common due to the types of economic uncertainties we have discussed above, having robust pricing software is essential for effective contract negotiation.

Companies need accurate data analytics to justify price points during contract discussions with suppliers or customers. Additionally, AI-supported negotiation guidance enhances value-based pricing by leveraging customers' willingness to pay for your company's offerings, leading to profitable and competitive proposals.

What’s more, in many jurisdictions where new environmental regulations are becoming more common, ongoing profitable pricing becomes manageable with modern pricing software supporting strategic negotiations through cost trend forecasting and scenario modeling.

Quality pricing software provides detailed insights into historical pricing trends and marketing conditions, empowering businesses to negotiate favorable terms that reflect true value while minimzing risks associated with fixed-price agreements.

6. Offsetting the Costs of Pricing Software & Mitigating the Cost of Digital Transformation

Investing in pricing software plays a crucial role in mitigating the costs associated with digital transformation efforts that companies will undertake in 2025 and beyond. As organizations revamp their operations towards a more data-driven approach, they require granular insights into customer behavior and market dynamics for effective decision-making regarding pricing strategies.

Pricing software automates data collection and analysis, reducing the need for manual labor and enhancing accuracy in forecasting and strategic planning. This automation streamlines operations, minimizes the risk of costly errors, and ensures that decisions are made based on real-time, reliable data.

Its role in a company’s digital transformation is pivotal, ensuring that the investment in such technology yields substantial returns, both in the short term and long term. Organizations that leverage pricing software effectively can transform their pricing strategies into a powerful engine for growth and profitability, making it an indispensable asset in the era of digital transformation.

To learn more and take a deep dive into how to transform your company’s digital maturity RIGHT NOW and mitigate the transformation costs with pricing software, check out this excellent and informative eBook from my Pricefx colleague, Sara-Marie Gansert:

Meanwhile, Happy Pricing!