What’s new in Price Calculation – June 2022

Welcome to this new blog series entirely dedicated to Price Calculation’s new features! With this new format, we would like to share with you on a bimonthly basis all new features that were delivered, as well as some insights on scenarios that you can implement with Price Calculation.

In this post, we will have a look on the main features delivered in April and May 2022:

NEW COMPONENTS IN PRICING TREE

Among the recently delivered features, our teams worked on enhancing the pricing tree to unlock new pricing configuration scenarios, and developed two important components:

Duration calculation

This new component enables you to determine the duration between two dates and to use this duration in a price condition.

Duration calculation component in the pricing tree

As an example, let’s imagine an e-mobility scenario. As a car sharing service provider, you may want to find out what was the duration of a trip made with a vehicle, by comparing its start and end date. With this data, you will be able to deduct the price of the trip, based on the number of minutes during which the car was used.

String comparison

In addition, to give the pricing tree the capability for making a decision based on a string field or a property, we introduced a new component: the “string comparison”.

This component enables comparisons based on the operators “Equal to”, “Not equal to”, “Starts with”, “Ends with” and “Contains”.

String comparison component in the pricing tree

Let’s take the example of defining a price element specification for a discount, depending on the fact that the consuming customer is a premium customer or not. A dedicated field „customer status“ would then be defined to contain the status level of the consuming customer.

In this case, you can use a string comparison component to compare the field „customer status“ against the constant value „premium“. If the customer level is equal to premium, the discount will be applied, otherwise the price element will be skipped.

WHERE-USED LIST

Following your feedback, that you would like to see more transparently which item is used in which process in our solution, we introduced in the relevant Pricing Configuration apps a where-used functionality.

While selecting a specific item in Price Calculation (let’s take as example a field in the field catalog), you can now see an extra tab named “Where-Used List” in the item page. In this tab, you find a list of all locations where this specific is used, as well as a short description and the quality in which this field is used (for example as a “lookup table output, or a “field in the pricing tree”).

The where-used list is available in the following applications:

• Manage Lookup Tables

Where-used list in the Manage Lookup Tables app

• Manage Price Element Specifications

Where-used list in the Price Element Specifications app

• Manage Field Catalog

Where-used list in the Manage Field Catalog app

NEW POSSIBILITY UNLOCKED: CHAINING OF LOOK UP

To extend even more the possibility of your pricing logic, it is now possible to chain lookup tables search criteria with the result of a preceding lookup table search. With such capability you can for example retrieve additional characteristics from a first table and then based on these characteristics get the price to apply from a second table.

For example, if you are an electric vehicle charging provider, you can retrieve the geographical area of the charging station delivering the service from one lookup table that references all the locations of the charging stations. Then, based on this location, you can determine from a second lookup table if there are specific conditions to apply on the service price (a specific local tax, a local surcharge or discount, …).

ENHANCED LOOK UP DATA FILTERING

To finish, this feature may be smaller, but it is definitely helpful to improve users’ experience within the Manage Lookup Table Data app: we have recently enhanced the filter bar to propose new search criteria on the administrative data.

With this feature, an advanced search capability on date range is also available for administrative data.

And the sorting dialog has been modified accordingly to allow sorting on those data.

That’s all for today, thank you for reading our blog post! And stay tuned for the next one.

To make sure you don’t miss it, follow the tag Price Calculation. And in the meantime, you can find out more about our solution in the information section below.

Please like this post if you found it useful, don’t hesitate to share it around you and/or to leave your feedback in the comment section.

In case of questions, feel free to ask them in our Q&A section using the tag Price Calculation.

Cloudily yours,

Élodie – PM @ Price Calculation

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