From 30+ price lists to one pricing matrix.

The situation

The company produces and distributes food products across several markets. When the engagement started, its pricing system consisted of more than thirty separate Excel price lists, maintained by different people, in different countries, with different update cadences.

No one could explain the full price waterfall. Base price, regional adjustments, volume discounts, promotional discounts, customer-specific terms: each layer was managed by a different team, in a different tool, with different approval logic. The final price a customer saw was the output of a process no single person could describe end to end.

Discount decisions varied for identical situations. Same product, same customer profile, same volume — and 10–15% pricing variation across markets, not from intentional local strategy but because each country's commercial team had developed its own habits over the years.

What actually ran, before we arrived

Mapping the pricing process that really happened, rather than the one in the policy manual, showed that many of the discount processes did not exist as processes. Inventory-release discounts are the clearest example: the commercial team received a list of at-risk stock, applied a blanket percentage and pushed it out. No elasticity analysis, no margin floor, no approval trail. Before any of it could go into software, the organization had to design the process.

The client was a sophisticated, well-run business that had not been through an enterprise implementation of this kind. Defining requirements up front, reviewing configuration in sprint demos and signing off user stories were all new. That took more preparation than we had planned for.

The decisions taken, and who took them

Framework first, local parameters second. Country teams had legitimate reasons for their differences — competitors, customers and regulation all vary. The agreement reached was on the framework: the data model, the approval logic, the escalation paths and the KPIs. Local flexibility became parameters inside that structure, not separate processes.

Exceptions had to be defended. In to-be-state workshops before any configuration, each country team mapped its current process and then defended its exceptions in front of the others. Many turned out to be artifacts of habit. The real ones became system parameters.

Requirements governance became its own workstream. Configuration reviews kept surfacing decisions nobody had formalized: who approves a 5% discount, who approves 12%, whether it changes by product, tier or country. Those are organizational design questions, and answering them needed dedicated time, facilitation and executive sponsorship — in parallel with the build, not as a by-product of it.

What changed

One pricing matrix replaced the thirty-plus spreadsheets. In practice that meant one place to design a pricing scheme, with product groupings, customer segments and discount tiers standardized so an analyst in any market works with the same logic and the same tool. One approval workflow, where every price change goes through a defined path based on the type of change, its magnitude and the market, with a complete audit trail. One set of guardrails — minimum margins, maximum discounts, escalation triggers — configured as parameters rather than carried as tribal knowledge. And one source of truth for pricing analytics across all markets.

The first market went live ten months after kickoff; the remaining markets followed at roughly one-month intervals.

What we would do differently

Invest in change management up front, not training. Fear of losing local autonomy was the largest source of resistance, and it could have been addressed much earlier with clear communication about the standardization-with-flexibility model.

Build the decision-making structure before the software. For each pricing area — base prices, volume discounts, promotions, customer-specific exceptions, inventory release — a dedicated session to settle who owns the decision, who approves it, what the boundaries are and what triggers an escalation, documented and signed off before configuring anything. It sounds slower. It is the fastest path.

Pick the most ready market for the first rollout, not the most strategic one. The first rollout is where everything is learned; the most enthusiastic, most digitally mature team should go first and become the internal champion for the rest.