Project Description
Successful price optimization system implementation driven by industry best practices and strong, structured project leadership, resulting in significant financial benefits and return on investment
The Client
A rapidly expanding North American division of a multi-billion-dollar international discount grocer.
The Challenge
The client had selected new pricing solution, but due to a major system infrastructure transformation in the coming years, the client did not allow any changes to legacy systems to accommodate the new software. In addition, the company needed to integrate newly obtained web scraped competitor price data into the pricing solution.
Further, pricing decision-making responsibility was shifting from senior executives and store operations leadership into the central buying and pricing teams, making change management a crucial success element for the implementation.
Finally, certain categories such as produce, dairy, alcohol, and fresh meat, faced local laws and distinct data and procedural characteristics related to pricing that necessitated the development of different data feeds, business rules, and process designs.
The Parker Avery Solution
The Parker Avery team provided industry-leading practices and project oversight while guiding technical discovery, business process design, configuration, change management, data validation, testing, and roll-out support to ensure the successful implementation of the new regular price optimization solution. Specific accomplishments included:
- Facilitated technical discovery activities to review data and system infrastructure needs and to identify required transformations and gaps
- Determined methods for providing required data to the pricing solution without disrupting current core merchandising systems
- Led business process design, including future state processes and roles & responsibilities for multiple categories
- Managed system configuration workshops and assisted in setting configurations
- Coordinated change management and training activities including stakeholder assessment, strategy development, enterprise communications, training, and post-implementation support
- Developed user acceptance testing plans and oversaw system testing
- Supported the client through implementation and roll-out