Before you develop a pricing solution model for customer requirements, you must understand how Oracle Advanced Pricing works. Pricing concepts can help you learn about the functional capabilities of Oracle Advanced Pricing. There are four
major pricing concepts:
- Pricing rules
It describes the rules-based logic the pricing engine uses to apply a pricing action to a transaction. Pricing rules are built around the customer and product hierarchies.With Oracle Advanced Pricing you can define rules dependent on data other than the pricing hierarchy. For example, discounts are often progressive-based on volume.
- Pricing actions
Pricing actions are specific pricing activities that the engine applies to transactions. For example, the pricing engine can establish a list price by applying a price list action to an order line. Similarly, discounts that lower the list price down to a net selling price are a modifier action.
Oracle Advanced Pricing provides pricing actions that can be used to handle pricing problems. Pricing Actions can be directly related to specific pricing forms, or objects. These objects are: Price lists, Agreements, Formulas & Modifiers.
- Pricing controls
Pricing controls are used to control how pricing applies actions. For example, effectivity dates can be used to control when rules are in effect and when they are not. They can also be used to define when an action that a rule points to can be applied.
Pricing also supports several other types of controls. For example, you can set up phases, which are groups of pricing actions. You can then tie these phases to physical events in order management. Incompatibility groups are another example of pricing controls. You can assign modifiers to incompatibility groups such that only one modifier within an incompatibility group can be selected by the pricing engine.
- Pricing extensibility
Pricing is often driven by customer factors, by trade customs, or by sales channel requirements. Almost no two companies implement pricing in the same way, even if they compete in the same industry. To address this variability, Oracle Advanced Pricing provides the following extensibility features that help meet your business needs: Flexible attribute mapping & APIs
Advanced Pricing in windows & HTML Interface
Pricing is a collection of business pricing objects, each of which has defined functionality. These objects and their associated functionality are a set of tools that you can use to construct a pricing solution. You interact with these Oracle
Advanced Pricing business objects using windows (or Forms) that you set up to obtain functionality.
Oracle Advanced Pricing provides an HTML-based user interface (UI) that enables you to complete many pricing tasks previously available only in the Oracle Forms-based interface. The HTML UI features guided steps and user-friendly pages
that you can use to set up and maintain modifiers, price lists, and qualifiers.
Cross-Format Compatibility
Pricing entities such as price lists, modifiers, or qualifiers created in one format can be maintained in the other. For example, if you created a price list in the Forms-based UI, you could update and maintain the price list in the HTML UI. You can still use the Forms-based user interface to set up and maintain pricing functions and features as in previous releases.