Prior to Loyalty Groups' Flex Pricing initiative, a product to be discounted would have one price, which would be available to the entire collector base. Loyalty did not have the ability to provide different prices to different collectors based upon collector data. The goal of the Flex Pricing project was to leverage existing information to provide personalized pricing based on collector segments. Using segmentation business users would have the ability to effectively offer Gold collector a different price than a Blue collector; or to offer different prices based upon a collector's region; or on where (the channel) the collector was redeeming the product from. The ability to provide a channel (WEB, CALL CENTER, Automated Voice Recognition Phone System) specific pricing model would also allow the business to promote channel specific marketing campaigns. For example, products redeemed on the web could be offered at a different price than those redeemed using the call center. Marketing campaigns offered by segment(s) needed to be tied to the pricing model as well. BAU Solutions Canada Inc. was tasked with developing a solution that leveraged the existing infrastructure to provide business and marketing users with a flexible way of adding both the regular price to a product and special prices to a product. Loyalty Group is also subject to external factors such as being compliant with Sarbanes Oxley; this lead to the need to provide electronic workflow to ensure that processes were followed, which includes such items as verification, approval and promotion.
Solution
Further to the above, BAU Solutions was tasked with planning, architecting, developing a project named Flex Pricing 2. The project consisted of a team of 10, which included some of the following positions:
- Project Manager
- Team Lead/Architect (BAU)
- Business Analyst
- Lead Designer (BAU)
- webMethods Designer (BAU)
- DBA
- webMethods Developer (BAU)
- J2EE Developer(BAU)
- J2EE Developer (BAU)
- J2EE Developer
Flex Pricing 2 was a project that involved redefining and improving the business processes that drive the promotion and delivery of retail products and their related data through Loyalty's multiple business channels (call center, web site, and automated phone system). The projected consisted of instantiating identified workflow processes electronically within Content Server, while building atop a Service Oriented Architecture. One of the goals of this project was to have Content Server as the single source of entry and repository for all product related data, which would deliver data to other applications through integration points via web services.
Flex Pricing 2 project also consisted of providing collectors with preferred/ segmented product prices for Universal Music Group's (UMG) multi-media products (music cds and dvds). Collectors defined by certain segments (ie. Business or Gold) would be presented with discounted prices along with personalized marketing communication text. Along with such offerings, collectors were also provided with bundled product offerings.(ie. 2 for 1). To meat such requirements the team was required to re-design the current pricing data model along with designing and developing a user interface for the management of such data. The user interface was integrated into Content Server's native user interface. In addition, most of UMG's products and pricing come in the form of XML feeds which were integrated into Content Server and dynamically mapped to prices based upon individual product costs.
Deliverables:
- Organized and lead design reviews and client work sessions.
- Created and delivered Non-Functional Requirements, Functional Requirements, Electronic Workflow Requirements and Design documentation.
- Redefined current business processes, while instantiating workflow processes electronically through Content Server's workflow.
- Built integration services between financial systems and processes and Content Server using webMethods and standard SOAP protocols.
- Built new web services for third party integration along with optimizing current web services.
- Designed and developed J2EE components (JSP, Java Classes, XML, etc. ) to meet all of the client's business requirements.
Technologies Utilized:
- Oracle 8i
- JSP
- SOAP
- XML
- Weblogic 7
- webMethods 6.1
- J2EE
- PERL
- Fatwire Content Server 5.5
- SQL/PL-SQL
- Solaris
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