PRICEXPERT is a pricing automation solution but here’s the history on how the pricing software company began.
Pricing automation software company Advanced Pricing Logic (APL), and APL’s pricing management software platform PRICEXPERT, is a story of how retailers had to create their own pricing management solution to a big problem.
Advanced Pricing Logic’s story really goes all the way to 1982 when APL founder and PRICEXPERT creator, Dave Leonard, started his first business, Original Parts Group, Inc. (OPGI).
A need to manage thousands of prices
OPGI was launched to because of the growing demand for aftermarket car parts. Success came very quickly for Dave and his company. First, Dave is a pricing genius and instinctively knows what kinds of car parts were hot and he knew where to manage pricing for improve profits. Second, he knows the importance of holding himself and his company to the highest levels of quality and customer service. He soon found himself in a very enviable position of a significant commercial success.
From the beginning of OPGI Dave was always adding new products to the OPGI retail product line. It wasn’t very long into the OPGI success story that Dave began to wonder how much further he and his management staff could guide the company to greater growth without software to optimize the process.
The concept was simple enough: generate a stream of data from in-house retail activity, manage it with software, augment it with algorithms to help guide pricing and promotions, and make it so easy to use that practically anyone with retail pricing experience could use it.
Implementation took a bit longer.
After several years of trial and error, in 1998 Dave and his small band of programmers produced and deployed the first in-house, semi-automated price management process. And even Dave was surprised by the early results: gross profit margins had jumped by an average of 20%. During this period of significant growth, the software team added a homegrown ERP solution, refined the core software, and developed new tiers of pricing automation to deal with multiple distribution channels within the auto parts industry.
About this time, the software team introduced a unique automated method to price kits and product bundles. These developments led to more innovation in pricing automation tools and ultimately true pricing optimization with competitor data tracking, predictive analysis, and prescriptive guidance.
Automated Pricing Software is Born
By 2000, Dave and his team of software engineers had successfully hammered together the core of an advanced automated pricing system. It was equipped with many powerful features that they had found in top-of-the-line systems deployed for major Fortune 500 retailers.
The OPGI business model includes manufacturing, retail, and distribution, so the program was modified to manage these complexities. It was discovered that the homespun ERP couldn’t keep up, so OPGI dropped it in favor of a widely used commercial ERP package. In 2008, an internal audit found that the homegrown software system was keeping up revenue gains consistent with the high-end pricing optimization solutions.
It was at this point that Dave realized that he had created something powerful.
Through his network with other small to medium business owners, he was aware that everyone was experiencing the same issues he had. But as big retailers grew their capabilities through automation, most small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) were left behind with time-consuming and cumbersome manual pricing optimization methodology. The playing field was tilted in favor of the big retailers.With no viable, reasonably priced software package on the market, the mother of invention once again visited and Advanced Pricing Logic was born on 2010.
The new company took control of the software, conducted research into new features, and tuned user controls for flexibility and ease-of-use. Then they added two more features: a price far below software solutions with comparable features and a great brand name that says it all: PRICEXPERT.
The PRICEXPERT Pricing Software Innovation
After nearly 10 years of real-world, real-time development, PRICEXPERT is not only a commercially viable software product, it is now a patent-pending innovation. Until now, SMBs had few viable choices –either mortgage their futures on million-dollar software solutions or go back to spreadsheets.
PRICEXPERT levels the playing field with powerful pricing automation tools. SMBs can now compete –SKU to SKU –for market share and profits.
And thanks to PRICEXPERT, almost any small to medium-sized retail operation on Main Street can quickly generate predictive analytics and prescriptive guidance that will compete with big retailers from Wall Street. And Dave still insists on the highest levels of quality and customer service.
PRICEXPERT is a trademark of Advanced Pricing Logic, Inc.