Company
A leading long steel manufacturing business that offers Merchant Bars, Beams, Rebars and Special Quality Bars to a diverse distribution and fabrication network of customers in the United States, Canada, and Central America.
Annual Revenue Range:
>$1B
Industry:
Steel Manufacturing
Locations:
North America, Central America
Deployed Solution(s):
Vistaar SmartPricing, Vistaar SmartQuote, Vistaar SmartRebate and Vistaar SmartForecasting
Business Challenges
• The U.S. Steel Industry faces a myriad of challenges in today’s market landscape. One of the most pressing issues is the persistent pressure from low import prices, prompting steel suppliers to respond aggressively to foreign fighter pricing, intensifying competition and driving margins down.
• Moreover, the industry grapples with the volatility of scrap or iron-ore prices and the dynamic nature of market costs, which add layers of uncertainty to strategic price planning and forecasting.
• Overcapacity also looms large in the industry, necessitating careful considerations around customer relationships and strategic discount initiatives. Amidst these challenges, accurately predicting demand and forecasting product and customer lifecycles emerged as a crucial, yet complex endeavor.
• The company struggled with the complexity of navigating the balance between profitability and competitiveness, before Vistaar came along.
Vistaar Solution Highlights
• A fully configurable Value-based pricing model, customizable by product line and customer type, driven by a variety of product attributes (such as Grade, Length, Processing, etc.) and customer attributes (such as End Use, Import Competitive Intensity, Customer Buying Profile, etc.).
• A guided workflow for managing long-term customer agreements and short-term quotes, controlled by relevant guardrails, approval rules and margin thresholds.
• A fully configurable rebate management module for managing off-invoice incentive programs such as volume growth rebates, tiered rebates, and one-time promotional incentives, by customers or buying groups.
• Comprehensive price and volume forecasting and tracking capabilities for sales, marketing, pricing, and S&OP teams to collaboratively plan, manage and analyze annual budgets as well as monthly rolling forecasts.
• Comprehensive margin bridge analysis and plan vs actual reporting to identify reasons for margin decline and unusual customer discounting, fostering a culture of nimble course correction for pricing and discounting strategies.
• Seamless real-time integration with SAP and Salesforce leading to faster collaboration and reduced lead times.
Sources of value
The broad objectives of the company’s pricing journey were to industrialize pricing processes across geographies, business units and their customer base, with a focus on improving pricing outcomes, creating efficiency gains, and forming a value-based pricing process.
Using Vistaar’s SmartPricing, SmartQuote and SmartRebate modules in a comprehensive end-to-end solution empowered their sales and pricing users to embrace scalable pricing and incentive management techniques, standardize communications and workflows across channels, automate price publishing and distribution to their customers, and maintain meticulous oversight on deep discounting patterns through plan vs actual reporting and various tracking mechanisms within the solution.
