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What is the Pricefx Knowledge Base?

February 10th, 2022 (Updated 03/10/2023) | 5 min. read

By Mike Deskis

We are excited to announce the new Pricefx knowledge base is now publicly available. This initial release is our first step in the journey to provide a broad and in-depth understanding of the Pricefx solution that will eventually become a valuable source of truth for our employees, customers, partners, and prospects. I would like to take you through our team’s journey towards knowledge management.

One of our first steps was to recognize that we support three unique audiences; business users of our application, technical users that build the solution, and administrators that maintain and configure a customer’s implementation. Each of these audiences has different needs and the knowledge base is designed to guide each of them to the content to support their role.

Why A Knowledge Base?

So, why this emphasis on a knowledge base application at Pricefx? There seems to be plenty of content and training already available for these audiences. The answer can be found as an expression of our Fast and Flexible values and our desire to increase the speed of time to value for our customers and partners. Productivity gains are engines of growth and the fastest means to acquire it has always been knowledge. This acquisition and application of knowledge lead to steep drops in learning curves which drive down development and maintenance costs.

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When I start a new project I like to begin with a simple problem statement, and in this scenario, the issue was never about not having enough information but rather too much in too many places. We are surrounded by many different systems that store information, but each one only provides a portion of the answers we seek, and used independently rarely provides the clarity we need. The outcome of our initial analysis recognized that we needed to rethink the methods and means of our information delivery and the knowledge base was born. But, to reach its full potential we would need to solve several issues.

A Place for Our Customers to Find Relevant Information

Our first goal was to ensure that any information being provided to our audiences would need to solve the problem of context. Whenever we convey information in an article inevitably there are embedded assumptions and presumptions that have been made that are important to the overall understanding. The solution was to provide new content to define these assumptions to fill these knowledge gaps and then provide an organized learning path that explains the journey to the audience.

Our next goal was to begin to dismantle our internal isolated silos of information. Just like data, information is created and stored in many different places and each of them serves a specific purpose (system documentation, trouble tickets, email, chat channels, etc). But, to provide the full scope of the Pricefx solution, with depth and breadth, we needed to provide consolidation of information. The knowledge base will need to be built by extracting all of the valuable content from all of our information systems into a knowledge-managed environment.

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However, the process of information consolidation then exposed another issue, there were some missing pieces. Like putting together a puzzle, the missing pieces are never discovered until we attempt to connect them all. It only takes a few critical missing pieces to skew our perception and understanding.  Since the pieces can’t be found, we implemented the process of enrichment. Our team working in concert with other teams within Pricefx designed and built these missing pieces to complete the knowledge picture.

Now we faced our next hurdle and this was the issue of organization. The process of enterprise documentation is a wonderful tool, and if we were to summarize the process it might sound like this; many different people with many different skills writing many different articles on many different topics. In isolation, all of these articles work very well, but with consolidation, we discover we have an organizational issue. The knowledge base must re-organize all of the consolidated articles into a readily understood navigational path so that the audience has a visual guide for their learning journey.

What’s Next in 2022?

Our ultimate goal is to provide a single source of truth to all individuals regardless of their pre-existing understanding of Pricefx or our solution or the role they will be performing. Pricefx wants to be the preeminent voice of authority in the pricing world and having a world-class knowledge base that provides answers to inquiring minds we will achieve that goal.

Throughout all of 2022, we will continually add new information and the knowledge base will take on the characteristic of an expanding universe. On the horizon for inclusion this year as major expansions; data integration, Accelerators, Integration Engineering and Solution Architecture. All of these planned expansions will continue to incorporate our goals of consolidation, context, enrichment, and organization.

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Mike Deskis

Product Education Manager , Pricefx