Pricing for spare parts

This enables the Bühler Group to optimize price management for spare parts on a central, digital platform. With additional features and even more extensive use, the full potential of the system has now been revealed: Bühler carried out a price revision involving several business units entirely in the Syncron system for the first time.

The Bühler Group is an internationally active technology group based in Uzwil, Switzerland. The company develops process solutions that are primarily used in the food and automotive industries: These include the processing of food and animal feed, as well as die casting, battery solutions, paints and surface coating. The technologies are also used in smartphones, solar modules, lipsticks and banknotes. Service and, in particular, spare parts management and the pricing of these parts play a major role in customer satisfaction. For Tjark de Vries, Head of Global Customer Service at Bühler, "above all, the fairness and credibility of prices are crucial for a satisfactory service". Two concepts that are difficult to grasp and can only be realized with the help of sophisticated pricing strategies and analyses - Syncron Price enables Bühler to automate both on a large scale.

Fully digitize pricing

In the past, Bühler used an Excel environment for pricing, which became too fragmented and time-consuming due to the company's growth and the time-consuming management of data and maintenance of interfaces. The challenge: all business units should implement pricing according to the same rules. Bühler's pricing team was therefore looking for an intelligent overall solution that would transfer the existing pricing strategy into a digital environment and bring all business units onto the same platform. Bühler found what it was looking for in the Syncron Price software from after-sales software provider Syncron. Markus Koch, Product Manager at Bühler, says: "With the Excel solution, we were forced to look at every single part. This is now a thing of the past since we started using Syncron Price. The tool enables us to process our data automatically with the help of intelligent algorithms."

Efficient features with future potential

With regard to the individual features of the solution, Markus Koch highlights the Equation Builder in particular - Bühler uses it to create price equations as part of the revision process, which has become significantly faster and more efficient as a result. "It used to take us several weeks to prepare the price revision. Now it only takes a few days," adds Dovile Akuckaite, Pricing Manager at Bühler. Syncron Price's analytics function is also in use and Bühler intends to make even greater use of it in future. The analytics module enables users to create their own dashboards and write ad hoc reports. This also plays a role in the annual price revisions: Analytics generates standard reports that Bühler can use to make the before and after results of the revision more comparable. The aim is to increase the efficiency of pricing and create a high level of transparency across all business units.

"Basically, we want to make even better use of the existing range of functions, for example in the area of competitor pricing and price feedback," says Markus Koch. "In the future, we are aiming for more intensive monitoring and would like to price our spare parts business company-wide on the Syncron platform." Thanks to the increased efficiency, the pricing managers at Bühler already have significantly more time to refine the pricing strategy. And this improves customer service, which is becoming increasingly important for Bühler - Tjark de Vries summarizes: "Syncron Price frees up resources at Bühler, which we use to respond more closely to the needs of different markets and to always be able to offer our customers an innovative and sustainable range of services."