Milliken
CUSTOMER STORY

How Milliken makes value-based pricing move at speed

Stephanie Kyle, Pricing Director at Milliken, leans on value-based pricing for the company’s highly differentiated products. With Pricefx automating the execution, quote creation fell from 6.2 hours to about half an hour and most quotes now auto-approve.

Frame 183  Protect margins  Pricing discipline
Headquarters
Spartanburg, South Carolina, USA
Employees
≈7,000 associates
Annual revenue
Not disclosed (≈$3.8B est.)
SKUs managed
Not disclosed
Markets served
Advanced materials
Countries
135
Bosch
CUSTOMER STORY

How Bosch cut quote cycle time by 70%

[Name], [Role] at Bosch, on replacing spreadsheets and giving sales the speed customers expect.
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person-dark  David Pacut, Pricefx, Senior brand and creative lead
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Headquarters
Spartanburg, South Carolina, USA
Employees
≈7,000 associates
Annual revenue
Not disclosed (≈$3.8B est.)
SKUs managed
Not disclosed
Markets served
Advanced materials
Countries
135

The story
Sells highly differentiated advanced materials, where value-based pricing fits a long heritage of science and innovation.
Treated post-COVID inflation and demand spikes as a wake-up call, because the manual ‘miracles’ the team ran were not sustainable.
Invested in pricing maturity with Pricefx as the forcing function, addressing people, process, and technology together.
Automated quote creation and approvals so the team can spend its time on value-based selling instead of execution.
avg_pace-dark  2:30
person-dark  David Pacut, Pricefx, Senior brand and creative lead
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The outcomes

70%

faster quote cycle — from days to hours

€2M

margin recovered in year one

40+

pricing approvers consolidated to a single workflow

The story

“Bosch's pricing team was managing thousands ofSKUsacross regions in disconnected spreadsheets, withquoteturnaround taking days.”​

“The sales team was losing deals to faster competitors,evenwhen Bosch's pricing was more accurate.”​

“With Pricefx, Bosch centralised pricing logicandautomated approval workflows, replacing thespreadsheet-and-overrides cycle.”​

“Quote cycle time dropped 70%, from days to hours,withfull margin visibility for finance.”​

The story

“Bosch's pricing team was managing thousands ofSKUsacross regions in disconnected spreadsheets, withquoteturnaround taking days.”​

“The sales team was losing deals to faster competitors,evenwhen Bosch's pricing was more accurate.”​

“With Pricefx, Bosch centralised pricing logicandautomated approval workflows, replacing thespreadsheet-and-overrides cycle.”​

“Quote cycle time dropped 70%, from days to hours,withfull margin visibility for finance.”​

The story

“Bosch's pricing team was managing thousands ofSKUsacross regions in disconnected spreadsheets, withquoteturnaround taking days.”​
“The sales team was losing deals to faster competitors,evenwhen Bosch's pricing was more accurate.”​
“With Pricefx, Bosch centralised pricing logicandautomated approval workflows, replacing thespreadsheet-and-overrides cycle.”
“With Pricefx, Bosch centralised pricing logicandautomated approval workflows, replacing thespreadsheet-and-overrides cycle.”

What is the hardest part of pricing, and what should not be?

In times of volatility, customer conversations should be the linchpin of getting things done, not our internal processes. The hardest part needs to be the storytelling to customers, not the execution into our ERP and CRM environments.

My name is Stephanie Kyle. I work for Milliken & Company, an advanced materials company and B2B manufacturer headquartered in Spartanburg, South Carolina, making everything from textiles to chemicals to flooring. My role is pricing director of our Center of Excellence; I report through corporate marketing and I’m responsible for Pricefx, among other strategic pricing projects.

 

How did pricing become a dedicated role at Milliken?

I started at Milliken in corporate strategy and moved into business-unit finance, doing commercial finance work. I saw pricing as a real gap and opportunity, and essentially wound up making my own job without knowing it. I championed the adoption of Pricefx, and when we decided to invest, we created a director of pricing role and I stepped into it.

 

What made Milliken invest in pricing maturity?

The volatility we’re seeing in the world right now was a wake-up call for Milliken. In the analog world we did an okay job of managing pricing and staying competitive. But when we saw post-COVID inflation and demand spikes, we realized the daily miracles we were working weren’t sustainable.

So we decided to invest in our pricing maturity, and a big part of that, frankly a forcing function, was our investment in Pricefx. I like to tease that we’re doing a change-management trifecta: people, process, and technology all in one go, and Pricefx is leading the way for us there.

 

Why value-based pricing for Milliken’s products?

Because we offer highly differentiated products and have such a history of science and innovation, the best pricing strategies for Milliken have been value-based pricing stories. Value-based pricing and selling isdifficult, though. It takes real effort to determine our next-best alternative, our points of differentiation, and how they ultimately affect our customers’ bottom line.

That’s the hard work to be done, and it’s where we focus most of our time and attention: making sure the products and services we offer add real economic value for our customers.

 

How is Milliken using AI and agents?

Milliken is at the very beginning of thinking about how AI can help us across all functions. In pricing, I’ve started to dabble in storytelling and in helping our businesses understand why to focus on pricing and how to prioritize, using generative AI tools.

We’re excited about the next frontier, especially because Milliken has chosen so far not to resource pricing heavily. We’re leaning on AI to create capacity where we don’t have the human resource, to level up our strategies and get our people thinking more deeply. That’s also why we’re excited about agents: they can free up capacity and do work a pricing analyst would, so our people spend time on the hard questions, not the minutiae.

 

What do you value about the Pricefx community?

I love Accelerate. It’s a place where we can bounce ideas off one another, from questions as nerdy as how you integrate price records to SAP S/4HANA, up to the big ones like how you’re dealing with tariffs or which pricing strategies are working today. It’s been really helpful to be among pricing people, especially those on this Pricefx journey who are making the software better for everyone.

People at Textile Factory in Urban Setting
Milliken

About Milliken

Milliken & Company is a privately held advanced-materials manufacturer headquartered in Spartanburg, South Carolina, founded in 1865. It designs and makes specialty chemicals, performance and protective textiles, floor covering, and healthcare products, and sells to customers in 135 countries. Milliken holds more than 2,500 U.S. patents.

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