Good to read: FAQs on price functions

There are multiple approaches to modeling your price landscape in Merlin CPQ: One option is to assign different price types and the corresponding price values to your products and features. These can include, for example, manufacturing costs, purchase prices, selling prices, margins, or discounts. Another option is to create configuration-specific calculations. These result in unique price calculations. The unique calculations are, for example, the result of different material usage or expenses.

The prices and corresponding calculations are then intuitively displayed for the sales team in the quote configurator. Additionally, you flexibly define which employee can access which price data using access rights. The big advantage: your sales team can provide qualified price information at any time as the prices are calculated alongside the configuration. Thus, your sales team profits from high price transparency and can best advise their customers on all sales alternatives.

There are different options for defining the corresponding price information in Merlin CPQ.

All data directly in the system: You model your entire price landscape using Merlin CPQ, manage all data in the CPQ solution, and provide them to the corresponding teams. You model, configure, and calculate in one tool. Using this option, you manage your price data with maximum flexibility.

Full integration of Excel: Another option is to fully integrate Excel tables. Merlin CPQ adopts price data from the corresponding Excel tables and imports them into your CPQ solution. You decide whether data is adopted entirely or only in part.

Integration of third-party systems: Furthermore, you can simply integrate your CPQ solution with third-party systems. Using the open interfaces of Merlin CPQ, you import any price data from third-party systems or query it live - for example, from an ERP system. This enables you to create calculations on the bill of materials level.

Additionally, you can create calculations including different price sources and thus only manage a part of the data in Merlin CPQ. You can then import the remaining data from, for example, Excel tables.

Using the different options, you can flexibly model your unique price landscape according to your requirements. Moreover, you can always access current and consistent price tables. Outdated data records are a thing of the past. Just choose the option that best fits your price landscape.

Using the price function, you can deploy multiple price tables for different subsets. Besides different products, these subsets can include, for example, countries, sales groups, time periods, or sales regions. Furthermore, you can adopt data from different price tables. Thus, you can prevent double efforts and costs.

Example: In a default price list, you manage the general product prices. However, distributors, who sell your products, sell them at a higher price and thus require their own price list. To save on effort and cost, you simply generate a new price list specifically for your distributor. This list is based on the default list and is, for example, multiplied by the factor 1.1. The general price data is adopted and increased by 10%, especially for the distributor. You can always manually change the price lists retroactively so as to even further customize your price data. Thereby, you can, for example, remove the 1.1 factor when adding purchased parts.

Often the switch between price lists creates very high manual effort and costs. New price data has to be entered, team access must be available, and you need to ensure that the switch is seamless. In practice, the process often looks different.

The seamless switch is much easier if the new price list is created before the switch, entered into the CPQ solution, and provided to all employees as of a specific date. Using the Merlin CPQ price function, you can assign temporal or even configuration-dependent validities to your price lists. You can switch from an old price list to the new price list in no time and your teams can immediately utilize the new data.

Using the rule-based price calculation function, you can implement any calculation approach in Merlin CPQ - for example, a product profitability calculation or mixed calculation. Additionally, you can set off different price types against each other. Thereby, entirely new price calculation options are available. Calculate your margin, model the rental costs for different contract terms, or use the rule-based price changes to calculate and display scaled prices or bundle prices.

In Merlin CPQ, you can perform price calculations as unique as your products and prices. For this purpose, various approaches are available to you. Our experts would love to answer all your questions and inform you about your options to best model your price model, optimize your price structure, and execute complex calculations.