How a Manufacturer Built Global Pricing Control Without Sacrificing Flexibility

A fuel and lubricants manufacturer that had spent two decades growing its business eventually found that its pricing processes could no longer keep pace. Cost changes and evolving commercial guidelines demanded faster decisions, but manual processes slowed updates and made pricing harder to govern.

The manufacturer responded with a 12-week pilot of Zilliant Price IQ in Asia Pacific, focused on improving spot quotes without taking flexibility away from sellers. By week six, Zilliant reports, the manufacturer was winning 75% of customer offers. Before the pilot finished, the manufacturer committed to a global rollout of Price IQ and Zilliant Price Manager.

What began as a regional test became a broader pricing model spanning list prices, customer-specific pricing, and spot quotes. The manufacturer ultimately gained a more consistent way to manage pricing across the business while preserving seller flexibility and putting pricing guidance closer to everyday decisions.

Pricing Control Without Sacrificing Flexibility

The manufacturer entered the project with a strong build-over-buy culture, making an outside technology partner a difficult internal sell. That raised the bar for the pilot: better pricing recommendations would matter only if sellers could use them without losing the flexibility they relied on in customer negotiations.

Zilliant Price IQ introduced customer segmentation and price-elasticity insights into the pricing process, giving sellers a more structured basis for deciding where to price an offer. The manufacturer did not use that guidance to replace seller judgment. Instead, the guidance gave sellers clearer guardrails while preserving room to respond to individual customers and commercial situations.

That gave the manufacturer a practical way to test pricing discipline before applying it more broadly. The question at global scale was no longer whether sellers could work with the guidance, but how to preserve that flexibility while coordinating pricing across regions and price types.

Going Global Meant Governing More Than Spot Quotes

Before the Asia Pacific pilot was complete, the manufacturer committed to taking the approach global. The broader rollout kept Price IQ in place and added Price Manager, extending the pricing model across list prices, customer-specific pricing, and spot quotes.

The two products played different roles. Price IQ supplied the pricing guidance, while Price Manager gave the manufacturer a consistent way to put that guidance into practice. Business rules, cost trends, and strategic inputs could be applied across the pricing process, with guidance expressed as either discounts from list price or markups on cost.

That structure allowed the manufacturer to coordinate pricing without requiring every market, customer, or transaction to use the same price. Customer-specific pricing could still reflect local conditions, while sellers retained flexibility within defined guardrails. Spot quotes could also be kept closer to the manufacturer’s revenue and profitability goals.

The global rollout standardized how pricing was governed. The manufacturer moved from improving individual pricing decisions in the Asia Pacific pilot to creating a common framework for how those decisions would be made across the business globally.

Making the New Pricing Process Work for Sellers

Expanding the pricing framework globally meant building adoption across the sales organization. The manufacturer brought top sellers into the rollout early and asked them to test the new pricing process and provide feedback. It then enlisted those sellers as change agents who could help explain the approach to their peers.

The manufacturer also held in-person listening sessions as the rollout expanded, giving sellers a way to surface concerns and provide feedback on the new process. Its pricing team worked with corporate communications on internal articles, webinars, and roadshows to explain how the model worked and why the business was changing its approach to pricing.

Zilliant says some of the manufacturer’s influential skeptics ultimately became advocates for the new model. The company also reports that teams spent less time working through spreadsheets, responded faster to cost and market changes, and had pricing guidance available at the point where decisions were being made.

Those outcomes show how adoption helped make the new pricing process work in practice. The manufacturer paired common pricing rules with seller input, communication, and room for judgment so the guidance could become part of everyday pricing decisions.

What This Means for SAPinsiders

• Pilots can define the right boundaries. Testing seller discretion alongside pricing guidance can reveal where central controls add value without harming commercial judgment. Those boundaries can then shape a more deliberate rollout.
• Scale the decision framework, not just technology. Global expansion introduces more price types, exceptions, and local conditions than a regional pilot. Standardizing how decisions are governed can matter more than standardizing individual prices.
• Seller feedback can strengthen pricing governance. Involving experienced sellers early creates a practical test of whether pricing rules work in real negotiations. Their feedback can expose weaknesses before those rules become embedded across the business.