Improvements to Skynamo promotions and contract pricing

Skynamo is a very good fit for representatives that visit customers and capture orders on site. Having accurate pricing and stock levels available, even when off-line, adds tremendous value.  

Initially, our pricing model lacked a few features and did not cater for complex pricing models encountered with more sophisticated ERP systems. We supported two discount models, deals (also known as price exceptions) and pricing contracts. 

A deal represented a specific price for a specific customer. This is very flexible and allows for complex price rules, however, it does not scale well as you end up with large numbers of deals. Take the number of customers multiplied by the number of products, and you quickly end up with millions of deal lines pushing the boundaries of mobile databases and the upper limits of scale at around 4 – 5 million deal lines. This caused a lot of load on our servers and the synchronisation of these deals to the mobile devices took very long and became error-prone.

An alternative was to use contract prices. The pricing contract model scaled much better as it represents a special price for a group of customers. The problem however was that the contract price model did not allow users to edit prices.  When customers required prices to be editable, contracts could not be used.

Now on Skynamo, both these concepts are merged into one, and is called “promotion groups”. Promotion groups have the advantage of grouping customers, much like the old contracts did. This reduces the size and complexity of pricing data, which means it will sync to mobile devices much faster.  Promotion groups can be configured to be editable, so your team will be able to edit prices unlike with the old contracts. 

Promotion groups do not “stack”. That means that discounts are not applied on top of other discounts. When multiple deals apply to a customer, the best price that the customer qualifies for is used. This way your customers will always get the best deal based on the rules that are set up.

For more detail about the way that Skynamo determines prices please get in touch with support@skynamo.com