The Pricing Challenge: Manual Processes Limiting Revenue Growth
Fonterra had been reliant on manual processes for their pricing and selling workflows. This strategy led to a number of compounding challenges that were costing the company in both revenue and margin:
- Difficulty bringing in data from internal and external sources
- The inability to make dynamic pricing changes
- Limited visibility into the profitability of pricing changes
- Slow and inefficient quote creation
- Slow customer response times
The company was spending money to change price conditions in SAP, as well as to fix contract mistakes. Fonterra knew they needed to modernize their pricing and selling strategy to achieve their long-term goals of growth and sustainability.
Solution: AI-Powered CPQ and Price Optimization with Conga
In 2015, Fonterra decided to start improving their quoting processes with Conga. They began by using Conga's price optimizer, analytics, and CPQ integrated into their SAP ERP — solutions equivalent to Smart Configure Price Quote (CPQ) and Price Optimization and Management (POM) by Conga today. Smart CPQ helped the company deliver faster quotes, while Price Optimization and Management gave them better pricing guidance.
These solutions were helping the company optimize their revenue, but they saw they could do more by changing the way SAP is used within their processes — utilizing it as their system of record. In 2018, Fonterra worked with Conga to move their pricing strategy completely away from manual processes in exchange for more flexibility and power.
The changes gave the company a single, all-encompassing pricing and selling solution that offered pricing guidance, automation, access to real-time commodity markets, and more. Fonterra uses Conga to power a solution they call Price Risk Management — a non-negotiable capability that Conga was uniquely able to understand and deliver.
We use the Conga toolsets within our business to enable pricing updates to be made much more quickly, with less opportunity for error—enabling our sales teams to trust the pricing data more and spend more time focused on the offer and final price negotiations with customers.
Alistair Draper
Head of Strategic Pricing
Fonterra
Results: Faster Pricing, Fewer Errors, and Greater Sales Efficiency
By partnering with Conga, Fonterra achieved a transformation in their pricing and selling capabilities:
- Pricing updates can now be made much more quickly and with far less opportunity for error
- Sales teams trust the pricing data and spend more time on offer development and customer negotiations
- A fully automated Price Risk Management solution — a unique capability that Conga helped design and deliver
- Reduced spending on costly SAP change requests
- A single, integrated platform replacing fragmented manual workflows
