Pricing

The pricing functionality calculates the price of a configuration while you are defining the configuration in the questionnaire. In this way, you base your answers on the price of the configuration as it is at that moment.

In many situations, the price of a configuration is equal to the sum of the prices of its components. Now suppose that each component is only chosen if a certain option is selected as an answer (a one-to-one relationship between the options and the components). Instead of assigning a price to a component, an alternative approach is to assign a price to the associated option and sum the prices of the options. QAD Configurator uses the approach of assigning a price to an option.

To assign a price to an option, define a pricing part for the option. QAD Configurator uses the price and price lists (if any) of this pricing part to find the best net price and the best list price of the feature option. Any item can serve as a pricing part. QAD Configurator uses the standard QAD Enterprise Applications “best pricing” engine to determine the best list and net price of a pricing part.

If selecting an option leads to selecting more than one unit of a component, then you want to incorporate the quantity information to pricing.

For numeric and numeric list features, you can select the Quantity Based check box in Variable Maintenance or Feature Maintenance. If you do not select this check box, the system only adds one unit of the component to the configuration.

For all other types of features, the Quantity Based check box is not available. In these cases, you can use a pricing rule. The pricing rule is a special type of rule, in which the pricing quantity (pricing_qty) attribute of the feature is set. QAD Configurator interprets the value of this attribute as the number of units of the component. If you do not define a pricing rule, the quantity is one.

• You can assign any price to an option by specifying a dummy item and using that item as a pricing part for the option.

• If a pricing part is not the component that is selected when you choose an option, then the number of units is not the number of units of the actual component. It is the number of units of the item that serves as the pricing part. In fact, the pricing quantity is only for finding a price in a price list and thus it does not even have to refer to units selected in the variant product structure. In other words, you can force the price of a configuration to go up when a certain option is selected, without selecting the component.

• If one or more components are always selected, independent of the answers given, then you can define a separate price or separate price lists. The separate price lists contain total prices of this collection of items and link them to a dummy item. Then you can use this dummy item as a pricing part. Make sure that the price is always incorporated in the price of the configuration. For example, you can define a rule to always select the relevant option of this dummy feature.

• If choosing a certain option means that more than one different component is selected, then you can create a price or price lists. The separate price lists contain prices of the collection of components and link them to the pricing part that you associate with the option.

Also provide a pricing unit of measure. The pricing unit of measure is often expressed associated with the pricing quantity. See the following example. If:

• The unit of measure of an item or a price list is gram

• and the unit of measure entered in Configurator is kilogram

• A pricing quantity of 2 in the questionnaire means a quantity of 2 kilograms

So far we have discussed pricing part, pricing quantity, quantity based, and unit of measure. You enter pricing part, quantity based, and unit of measure in Variable Maintenance and Feature Maintenance. In general, the data entered in Feature Maintenance is used, but there are two exceptions to this rule:

• If Std Options is selected in Feature Maintenance, the data from the variable option is used.

• If the feature is a logical and the answer in the questionnaire is equal to no, then QAD Configurator uses 0 as the price for the feature. If the answer is yes, then QAD Configurator uses the pricing information as specified in Feature Maintenance.

Note: The price of the configuration shown in the questionnaire is always the price of one unit of the configuration.