Overcoming the Dynamics Hindering Growth in MRO Distribution

This article first appeared on Industrial Distribution.

Industry challenges like new and emerging competitors controlling large portions of market share, managing millions of SKUs and a growing skills gap can all play a role in hindering the growth of companies within the maintenance, repair and operations (MRO) distribution sector. According to intelligence firm Beroe Inc., the MRO market will reach $660 billion by 2020, but even still distributors are struggling to retain or grow their market share. Taking a closer look at how pricing decisions are made, how customer-specific price agreements are maintained, and how to infuse personalized pricing and sales guidance into all sales channels, may be the keys to driving volume or margin growth.

To explore how price optimization can produce market relevant prices, Zilliant — a provider of intelligent B2B price optimization and management and sales guidance software — offers a visual pricing playbook outlining average margin leakage, the mix of price modes, how to pair customer assignments with market realities, and how to solve for system pricing drift. Distributors who implement price optimization are able to:

Optimize system prices to ensure they accurately reflect the market reality and will be used by the sales team more frequently Provide override guidance with guardrails to reduce over discounting Deliver optimized customer-specific guidance Utilize visual analytics to pinpoint and correct where unnecessary price deviations exist Enable a more strategic pricing response to cost volatility

When data science is designed to solve the pricing problems unique to MRO, applied to relevant in-house or other data sources and fine-tuned with the guidance of internal pricing experts, the issues of scale and speed in responding to external forces are mitigated. To learn more about the technology to achieve this, as well as sales guidance that grows wallet share, improves retention and increases average order size, visit zilliant.com.

Zilliant illustrates this in a new infographic here.