An international challenge
In a fiercely competitive and increasingly cost-driven environment, it’s essential that multinational companies adopt a strategic and holistic approach to pricing across geographies and products. This is why one of the world’s top five agribusiness companies turned to a-connect for support when it set out to roll out and implement its new global pricing processes and toolkit in its 15 largest markets across the world.
The objectives
In addition to delivering tangible bottom-line improvements through pricing, the client had two specific objectives:
- To sustainably improve its internal pricing capabilities from pricing principles and price-setting to management of commercial terms and pricing execution.
- To better support commercial decisions by establishing pricing as a critical function within the organisation.
Our strategy
Our global reach and human resourcefulness allowed us to place local project managers and associates with strong pricing expertise in the client’s largest markets across North America, Latin America, Europe and Asia.
Our project managers worked as co-leads with the client’s global project managers, supported by associates from both the client and us. The a-connect project managers focused on securing continuous support on the ground, providing pricing thought leadership, and managing the project, allowing the client’s internal project managers to focus on the important stakeholder management.
With this approach, a-connect ensured global consistency throughout this 2+ year program, as project teams worked in parallel in different countries for 3-6 months each, with constant loop-back to the global headquarters and alignment with the project teams in the other countries.
Creating value and generating revenue
After 2 years, the new pricing processes and toolkit were successfully implemented in the client’s top 15 countries and implementation in the smaller countries was launched. The project delivered average price increases of two to four per cent across countries—an increase expected to generate US $180 million by 2018 in the client’s largest country alone.
Furthermore, by insourcing local project management and pricing expertise from one global partner, the client benefited from a seamlessly coordinated international project while retaining control and building its own internal capabilities.
To learn more on how a-connect’s project management and pricing experts can support your business, please contact us.
