Workflow
Pricing and margin workflows
Workflows that take supplier costs, market signals and internal rules and turn them into prices, discounts and approvals — with visibility of margin impact at each step.
This may look different in your business. The same pattern can apply to other workflows where information is collected, checked, compared, enriched, approved, reported or acted on.
What this workflow usually involves
Receiving supplier price changes, comparing against current pricing, calculating margin impact, applying rules, getting approval and publishing changes to the systems that need them.
Where it breaks
- Supplier files arrive in different formats.
- Margin rules are not codified.
- Approvals happen in email, not in the workflow.
Common inputs
- Supplier price files
- Current price lists
- Cost and margin rules
- Competitor data where available
Common outputs
- Updated price lists
- Margin impact summaries
- Audit trail of changes
- Alerts on out-of-policy proposals
Where AI can help
Ingesting and normalising supplier files, calculating margin impact, drafting summaries for approvers and flagging deviations from rules. AI prepares the decision; people make it.
Where human review belongs
On final price changes, on discount approvals and on anything that affects customer-facing commitments.
Systems often involved
- ERP
- PIM
- Spreadsheets
- Ecommerce platform
- Supplier feeds
Example applications
- Supplier price change and margin analysis
- Competitor pricing and assortment monitoring
- Discount approval workflows
How value is measured
Time to react to a supplier change, share of changes processed within target window, margin variance against plan and number of out-of-policy issues caught before publish.
Where this connects