Art der Publikation: Beitrag in Sammelwerk

Digital Technologies for Pricing Problems - A case study on increasing the level of digitization at a leading German retail company

Autor(en):

Weber, Felix; Schütte, Reinhard

Herausgeber:

Iiis

Titel des Sammelbands:

Proceedings of The 10th International Multi-Conference on Complexity, Informatics and Cybernetics 2019 - Volume 2

Seiten:

189-196

Ort(e):

Orlando, Florida, USA

Veröffentlichung:

2019

Digital Object Identifier (DOI):

doi:10.13140/RG.2.2.18730.47042

Zitation:

Download BibTeX

Kurzfassung

In many parts of the retail sector, the market structure is oligopolistic which leads to high interdependencies of the decision parameters (price, product, promotion, placement). Still, the analysis of interactions and the resulting automation of decisions has not yet progressed much. The ever-increasing intra-and inter-competition, increased costs, and a lower differentiation margin have led to the need to rethink the low priority of these parameters at one of Germany's largest retailers. The presented case study focuses on a research and consulting project on the digitization of price management. In an initial step, the transparency within the software systems was increased by making the competitors' prices available. This was followed by increasing automatization using the store's individual competitive factors. In a final step, a proof of concept was sketched to cope with the immense amount of data and the complexity of algorithms by using in-memory database technology. Within the project, it became clear that digitalization is a continuous process, as the company is not fundamentally at risk in the situation under consideration. Moreover, digitization is not independent of the degree of digitization that has already been achieved. The consulting project showed major results: about 25% of the total manual workload was reduced and an overall margin improvement of 0.2 percentage points could be achieved.