A major retailer operating over 6,000 stores across the U.S. and Canada was facing severe issues with their custom-built price execution system. This system frequently failed, resulting in pricing inaccuracies and causing a breakdown in customer trust. The retailer’s pricing errors lingered in stores, creating inconsistency across locations and impacting overall profitability. With a need to support both retail and B2B operations, the company sought a robust, real-time pricing solution that could scale with their large and complex business structure.

The Challenge

The retailer’s primary challenges stemmed from their outdated system, which couldn’t keep up with the scale and complexity of their operations:

• Inconsistent Pricing: The custom-built price execution system often failed to deliver accurate, up-to-date prices to stores. This led to frequent pricing errors, with outdated or suboptimal prices remaining in place for too long. The delays in price updates resulted in lost revenue and decreased customer satisfaction.

• Multiple Systems, Complicated Process: The retailer’s pricing system relied on multiple, disconnected tools for distributing prices across different store banners and business units. This lack of integration between systems made it challenging to coordinate price updates effectively, further compounding pricing issues.

• Scalability Issues: The system needed to scale to support both retail customers and B2B operations, but it was not flexible or robust enough to manage the complexity of serving different types of customers. The solution also had to ensure seamless integration across thousands of stores, each with varying requirements.

With their pricing system in dire need of an upgrade, the retailer turned to DoubleBlaze to deliver a comprehensive solution that would address these critical issues.

Our Solution

DoubleBlaze took a phased approach to implementing a real-time price execution system capable of handling the retailer’s extensive network. Our team focused on building a system that was reliable, scalable, and able to provide accurate price updates to both retail and B2B stores. Our key strategies included:

• Batch-Based Price Execution for Immediate Relief: In the first phase, we implemented a batch-based price execution system for the retailer’s U.S. retail customers. This solution provided immediate improvements by stabilizing price updates and eliminating many of the errors that were previously plaguing stores.

• Transition to Real-Time Pricing: After the initial success of the batch-based system, we transitioned the entire operation to a real-time price execution model. This ensured that price updates would be instantaneous and always reflect the most accurate, up-to-date information across all stores.

• Seamless Integration Across Business Units: In the final phase, we rolled out the real-time system to support not only retail customers but also B2B customers. This ensured that the price execution system worked smoothly across different store banners and business units, regardless of customer type. The system was fully integrated with upstream pricing tools and downstream systems, enabling consistent data flow and eliminating errors.