Every price on purpose
In distribution, price is everything — and at this client, every customer at every branch for every product can have a different one. That's not a bug; it's the business model. The question was how to make hundreds of thousands of prices deliberate instead of accidental. The answer is a closed loop of four systems.
When everyone can set a price, no one owns the margin
A hundred-plus branches, each operating with real autonomy. Thousands of vendors changing costs constantly, each announcing it their own way. Salespeople granting special prices to win jobs. Every one of those decisions is locally reasonable — and collectively, without governance, they quietly erode margin across millions of transactions. Spreadsheets can't govern this. Neither can memos.
The goal wasn't to take pricing power away from the branches. It was to give everyone guardrails — so local judgment operates inside company strategy.Governance, not centralization
Four systems, one closed loop
True costs in, governed margins applied, exceptions by workflow, customer-ready prices out — and an audit function double-checking the results downstream.
The margin cascade
Strategy at the top, judgment at the edge — with each level choosing only within what the level above allowed.
Company defines the range
Available margin points per product group and product line, per region — say, anywhere from the low twenties up to 40, 50, 60 points depending on the category.
Region managers narrow it
From the region's available points, they define what each warehouse may use — typically two to three margin points per product group. More granular, still governed.
Warehouse managers apply it
Margins assigned per customer or customer group. The result becomes pricing condition data in the ERP — so every live quote automatically lands inside the intended margin, date-aware.
Special prices, without the back channel
Winning a job sometimes needs an exception. Exceptions now have a process instead of a phone call.
Request
A branch salesperson requests a special price — for a product or group, for a customer or group.
Review
The pricing team sees margin impact and that customer's sales history for the product.
Decide
Approve, adjust with a counter-proposal, or decline — recorded and auditable.
Load
Approved conditions (product+customer, or customer+group) load into the ERP automatically.
Quote
The branch quotes the customer — and gets the special price without touching anything.
Price booklets a contractor can carry
A contractor walks into a branch needing prices for a job — or to quote their own customers. The platform prints a booklet of their prices: logically grouped, range-divided, tens of thousands of customer-specific calculations formatted on demand. The pricing machinery becomes something you can hand across a counter.
Costs you can actually trust
Margins are only as good as the costs beneath them. With thousands of active vendors announcing changes in their own formats, the cost-update module normalizes everything in one place and applies it automatically — so the guardrails always stand on current ground.
Pricing policy that executes itself
Every customer, at every warehouse, for every product, can have its own price — and every one of them is deliberate.Complexity, governed
More from this engagement
The distributor that stopped typing
The full engagement: 1.5M documents, 5M audited lines, governed pricing, and B2B e-commerce at scale.
Read the story → Solution storyFive million lines, re-checked every year
The audit function that closes the pricing loop — 96.66% of flags resolved on time.
Read the story → Solution storyThe customer is a company, not a login
Where branch-specific pricing meets 258,781 customer companies online.
Read the story →Do you know which of your prices are on purpose?
If margins live in spreadsheets and exceptions live in inboxes, the honest answer is "some of them."
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