Order Management Concepts - Qualifiers and Modifiers

Qualifiers:

A qualifier defines eligibility rules for modifiers and price lists.

A qualifier can be a customer name, a customer class, an order type, or an order amount that can span orders.

Though a qualifier may be set up independently, it comes into effect only when linked to a modifier or a price list. Thus, the modifier that is set up and linked to a qualifier determines who the price adjustment will affect as well as the amount that will change.

You can create qualifier groups to apply individual qualifiers as a set. When you group qualifiers, they become a set, which allows for faster searching and setup.

Modifiers:

Modifiers determine the adjustments made to the list price. These are dependant on various business factors such as the type of adjustments to make, the level at which the adjustments are made, how the modifiers are qualified, how they are applied, etc. You can create three modifier list types in Oracle Pricing:

• Discount List
• Surcharge List
• Freight and Special Charges List

There are four modifier line types available in Oracle Pricing:
• Discount
• Surcharge
• Freight and Special Charges: Amount applied to the customer invoice for movement of a shipment to a destination
• Price Break: Only point price breaks are allowed in Basic Pricing modifiers. For example, the following pricing decisions are:

If Item Quantity = 1-50, then discount = 5%
If Item Quantity = 51-100, then discount = 7%
If Item Quantity is between 101 and 99999999999, then discount = 10%.
So if the ordered item quantity is 110, then the discount applicable is 10%.

Modifier controls are of the following types:
Pricing Event is a time in the process flow of the calling application at which it makes a call to the pricing engine (analogous to an Oracle Workflow event); for example, Book Order in Order Management.

Pricing Phase is a user-defined group of modifiers that the search engine considers together when applying them to pricing requests, for example, Phase 1: Line Adjustments.

Incompatibility: In any given level within the same phase, the system only allows one modifier to be selected. The pricing engine may retrieve more than one modifier that meets the calling request and can be applied. There are three methods to resolve incompatibilities within the modifiers that the pricing engine retrieves:

• Precedence
• Best price
• Exclusivity

Incompatibility Level: Each modifier has an incompatibility level. If there is more than one modifier line with the same incompatibility level, the pricing engine selects the one with the highest precedence. If there is more than one modifier with the highest precedence in an incompatibility level, the pricing engine selects the modifier that provides the best benefit to the customer.

In Basic Pricing, users cannot add additional phases or events, and incompatibility level and buckets are defaulted.

Order Management Concepts - Basic Vs Advanced Pricing

Oracle offers two levels of pricing functionality: Basic and the separate enhanced product, Advanced Pricing. While both levels of functionality share some similarities, the licensed Advanced Pricing application extends the ability to adjust pricing.

Price Lists:
The creation of price lists within both levels carries many of the same elements. Both are able to add items to, and copy price lists. However, as you implement Advanced Pricing, the ability to use Qualifiers, Pricing Attributes, and Secondary Price Lists becomes extended from only allowing the default or one context element in Basic, to an unlimited number of values being available.

Agreements:
The use of Agreements is the same for both Basic and Advanced Pricing. They are both able to identify customer items, create price lists, use versioning, and define price breaks.

Formulas:
Both Basic and Advanced Pricing allow Static Formulas, while only Advanced Pricing allows the use of Dynamic Formulas.

Modifiers:
While both basic and Advanced Pricing have the ability to execute Discounts, Surcharges, Freight Charges, and point-based price breaks, Advanced Pricing extends this functionality greatly. Advanced Pricing also allows price modifications via Coupons, Terms Substitution, Promotions, Item Upgrades, and Other Items discounts. Additionally, Advanced Pricing
allows you to implement adjustment functionality that will change the list price used for the adjustment; affect the timing of when the adjusting activity will occur; and enable you to define rules affecting which adjustments may be used at the same time. In Advanced Pricing,
you can also flag discounts as exclusive, which implies that only that discount will be eligible and no others.

Note: Additionally, Advanced Pricing enables you to derive prices from external sources. For further information on the Advanced Pricing functionality, please refer to the Advanced Pricing User and Implementation Manuals.