Prices – clever and simple calculation

Introduction of a new PriceEngine at AGRAVIS Technik

24th February 2023

As one of five main agricultural cooperatives in Germany, AGRAVIS Raiffeisen AG, headquartered in Münster, generates a turnover of approx. € 7.3 billion and employs almost 6,400 people in the sectors agricultural wholesale, markets/stores and energy.

The DOCK program initiated by AGRAVIS in 2019 focuses on the group-wide introduction of SAP S/4HANA to support the company's core merchandise management processes – with consenso as the implementation partner. With the go-live of the first Technik company, one of the subgoals of DOCK – the introduction of a new pricing tool – could already be achieved at an early stage.

The replacement of the existing price calculation was already decided at the beginning of the first program activities. The solution used until then was technologically based on a Microsoft Access database. In order to set the prices for the relevant articles and then export them, a lot of manual work was required before and after. Together with various system breaks, this resulted in a process that worked, but was complex and extensive, and thus ultimately inflexible and time-consuming.

However, the calculation logic used for the price calculation, developed for AGRAVIS by the consulting company EbelHofer Consultants, was assessed as efficient and in line with current and future requirements. Thus, this logic was also to be used in the new tool. The core is a rule-based price calculation, calculating a corresponding price per article and supplier on the basis of various master and transaction data constellations.

Consequently, the objective was to integrate the price calculation into SAP, both in terms of processes and architecture, without changing the defined set of rules – and thus to significantly reduce the manual effort in particular.

The PriceEngine newly implemented at AGRAVIS by consenso consists of two modules, the user interface (frontend) and the actual calculation (backend).

The backend design is flexible and can be used on any ABAP system. The price calculation in BRF+ is based on the set of rules defined by EbelHofer Consultants and is included in SAP CAR. Using BRF+, different, previously rigid rules can be mapped without much effort while allowing a high degree of flexibility due to the integration in SAP. Thus, specific classifications can be determined in various dependencies at runtime and are not bound to predefined key figures.

The frontend was developed with SAP Fiori and provides the users with a clear view of their own worklist. Via the UI, e.g. the prices calculated automatically during a night run can be checked, released accordingly and then transferred to the S/4 system.

Compared to the previous tool, a new feature is the ad-hoc price calculation, allowing direct calculation of any article as required.

With the introduction of the new PriceEngine, the manual effort for AGRAVIS employees has been significantly reduced. Thanks to direct access to all data relevant for pricing in SAP, steps such as the manual import of price lists or the downstream export in Excel are simply no longer necessary – a considerable acceleration of the process. The current architecture also results in a significant increase in performance. Prices for approx. 24 million articles are now calculated in less than a minute!

Together with the process acceleration, the simple extensibility and the flexible mapping of the pricing rules lead to a significant improvement in acceptance by the business department.

In future, however, AGRAVIS will not work exclusively with defined rules. Thanks to the open architecture, the range of functions can be expanded step by step. In future releases, the UDF forecast functions can be used to determine price elasticities, and a price analysis cockpit will be integrated via the SAP Analytics Cloud.

We are very much looking forward to these and other challenges in the DOCK program and would like to thank all the AGRAVIS employees involved for the really great cooperation!