April, 2004 — When Essex Electrical Products wanted to get better "wired" to improve pricing productivity and customer responsiveness, the 74-year-old manufacturer of electrical wiring for industrial, commercial, and residential use turned to Metreo and its integrated pricing solution.

"When I joined the company two years ago, Essex Electrical was developing price quotes manually," says Harold Karp, president of the Ft. Wayne, Ind.-based company. "It was largely by gut feel or seat of the pants."

Essex began to develop an in-house pricing solution and made gains through 2001-2002, but it was still a cumbersome process dependent on loading and manually updating information in spreadsheets. The company began working with Metreo in 2003 to explore how pricing optimization could improve its price quoting.

Essex's internal sales staff fields hundreds of inquiries daily from customers shopping to get the best price from available suppliers. Essex stocks more than 200 SKUs manufactured at two plants, and offers numerous types of discount programs and shipping terms. It wasn't easy to manage the data needed to guarantee best price to the customer and, at the same time, profit for the company.

"If someone was out sick, or there was something different about a particular quote or program, it was difficult to quantify and compare the opportunity the potential sale represented to the company," says Karp.

"Metreo maintains all that information in one place, providing total pricing visibility," Karp adds. "It enables you to quickly quantify the opportunity by comparing all the elements of the cost of doing business: different rebates, freight costs, or dating agreements. It will enable us to very quickly determine the most competitive price—what's good for the customer and best for us."

The Metreo pricing suite:

• Ties price execution, analysis, and planning together in one integrated solution, providing optimal pricing that maximizes business objectives in all segments.
• Creates an evaluation and decision framework for guiding the negotiations process.
• Enables companies to quickly adapt company pricing to changing business requirements and customer buying behavior.

Metreo's Integrated Pricing Solution, concludes Karp, "enables companies to increase profitability through better pricing decisions and improved pricing execution."