Industrial Manufacturer Leverages Web to Improve Complex Pricing Process

John Crane Inc., the world’s largest manufacturer of industrial seals and other sealing/lubrication products, offers more than 800,000 different parts, and adds thousands more SKUs every year. This huge parts base and exponential product growth drove a complex, all-manual pricing process that not only was time-consuming to manage and update, but also created opportunities for errors.

By any standard, John Crane’s pricing process was cumbersome. For every order, sales representatives – hundreds of them, in six regional offices – had to use a 600-page pricing guide to find the right part and sub-components (each slightly different in size, materials, features and use) in dense configuration/price grids, look up and apply multipliers for special features, compile it all by hand in a pricing form, then determine the total. It was possible for different sales reps to price the same part and come up with different answers.

What’s more, the price data for every new part had to be entered by hand into the system. And annual updates were a three-month process. The company had to dedicate several full-time employees to maintaining the price data and producing the pricing guide.

After many years of working with this inefficient, time-intensive process, John Crane decided it needed to find a better solution.

To automate pricing and simplify price-generation, Dunn Solutions Group developed web-based configuration and pricing tool for the international sales force. Running in a standard Web browser, it offers parts drawings to make identification easier, uses yes/no questions and drop-down menus to guide dynamic pricing, and, in the end, delivers consistent, accurate prices. It also allows sales reps to create new, customized parts and test-price different part/component configurations.

Back at the corporate office Dunn Solutions developed a Windows-based application to uncomplicate the creation, configuration and updating of pricing tables. More than a just a pricing matrix, the application gives users the ability to create question trees to determine part selection, configuration and pricing. These dynamic question trees guide sales representatives step-by-step through the process using pre-defined part attributes.

The price engine maintenance application contains all the information users need to add new parts and define attributes, create pricing tables, update existing prices and tables, and generate the question trees. With a simpler workflow and greater automation, these manual tasks are completed in a fraction of the time required under the old process. And when all the input is completed, the application automatically creates and updates all affected pricing tables.

The price engine maintenance application also automatically performs the annual re-pricing, updating prices across-the-board, by category or individually. This important yearly project, which used to take three months, now is completed in less than 30 days.

Today, John Crane Inc. is seeing substantial time savings and significant process improvements delivered by the configuration and pricing engine. What’s more, the company’s sales reps – and its customers – are enjoying the tool’s ability to develop and deliver faster, more accurate pricing.