A Price Management System for easyCar

Background

EasyCar trades from around 2,400 locations in 60 different countries and offers a range of about 30 cars for hire periods between 1 day and 56 days. The price is set in various currencies for each car group in each location for various rental periods. The easyCar Price Management System (EPM) uses margin and competitor price rules to automatically suggest revised prices based on updated competitor prices and cost prices.

Project Summary

When easyCar decided to undertake this new project, Retail Answers was the obvious choice as it had been designing, developing and supporting systems for easyCar since 2001.

Retail Answers designed a simple user interface to process vast volumes of data quickly and easily and developed the system with the following functionality:

• The load of current cost and selling prices from the trading web site.
• The import of competitor prices.
• The ability to enter margin and competitor variance rules at a location, currency and rental period level.
• A price management screen to use these rules to generate a suggested selling price and show the new competitor variances and margins.
• A rule adjustment screen to exclude individual competitors and to adjust rules at a car group level.
• The upload of approved new prices to the trading web site.
• The storage of a complete history so that the impact of price changes can be measured.

Benefits

easyCar are now enjoying the following benefits:

• The complex spreadsheets that were used for pricing have been replaced by an easy to use system reducing the time to price a location from days to hours.
• Accurate data is automatically loaded ensuring decisions are based on solid facts.
• A rule based system ensures that prices meet minimum margin constraints.
• Automated pricing means that inconsistencies are eliminated.

Owen Coles, easyCar’s pricing manager said:

“Retail Answers has shown considerable creativity in the rule design and the user interface. We now have a truly integrated, automated system which will provide a great platform for our future pricing decisions.”