Managing Products with Packaged Pricing

Recently I was asked one of the most common questions regarding the Product Catalog of Dynamics CRM and realized that even though the functionality has not changed much since version 1.0, many users don't take the time to really look into the ways of setting up various products.

Specifically, the user asked me how I would use the four core Product Catalog areas (Discount Lists, Unit Groups, Price Lists, and Products) to accommodate a list of products that had been priced using a packaged pricing model.  The result looked like this:

Before diving in, which is the caution I rarely see users take, I did a little analysis on the products and prices to get a better understanding of the packaged pricing model and what driving factors may have been behind it.

First, I used the maximum quantity value for each group to determine a generalized unit price for each packaged group.  After that, I calculated the percentage and dollar discount values for each packaged group.  Finally, I studied the trends of the unit prices and discounts to see where there might be target markets, loss leaders, etc.  Below is what I got:

Now, originally, the user wanted to set up a different product for each packaged group (Widget1 - 1 to 5, Widget 1 - 2 to 6, etc.) and establish a Discount List to fit the percentage or dollar amounts based on the analysis.  The problem with this is that it make for a pretty unwieldy product list for the users when they are trying to add products to Opportunities, Quotes, Orders, etc.

Instead, we created a Unit Group containing each of the packaged groups, then created a single product utilizing several Price List Items (using the Units from the newly created Unit Group).  In the unit groups, we simply used the name field to describe the group quantities, then used the actual unit quantity to refer to the unit number of packages the customers would be buying (i.e., eaches).

Finally, when we created the Price List Items, we just used a Currency Amount pricing option to circumvent the List Price options from the parenting product.

Our end result enabled the simplest option to accommodate all the pricing options for the short list of products without creating too many moving parts that might make ongoing management (of Discount Lists, Discounts, Price Lists, Products, Product List Price values, etc.) difficult if not impossible!!!

Now, if they want to take that pricing setup to the next level to allow subjective discount levels, they can layer on top of it some distinct Discount Lists that will work in conjunction with the other setups and require no retrofitting efforts down the road....