Tech Talk

04/18/2023 2

List Price Services The Cisco List Price Framework is a workspace where IT and

Business users are able to setup Pricing Attributes, Pricing Methodologies and Price Formulas and which are consumed by different down streams.

It’s a workspace where price approval processes are created and documented for audit purposes.

The List Price Service Framework enables the generation and application of list prices based on formula-driven attributes.

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Ru

les

Data

Promotion Pricing Rules

PromoService

DM

Serv

ices

QTC

List Price Service

QTC QP Engine

C3 QP Engine (CA PD)

C3

Contractual Discount Service

EDMS

DM

Accuprice Service Get List PriceGet Net Price

Configure Order

Item Master

Cisco Commerce Workspace

Su

bsc

rib

ers

Product Pricing Service Pricing Service Discounts

Product Quoting & Ordering Tools (Legacy)

Product Discounts Promotional Discounts

Service Quoting & Ordering Tools

Quote

DM

Pri

cin

g f

or

PD

R q

uote

s

LPS Logical Architecture

Validation Rules

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List Price Calculation (Reprice)

This process consumes pricing attributes from the setup Item Master DB and calculates the final list price using pre set formulas (Base Price, Different Factors,Rounding Rule, Currency Change etc)

It also performs various validations which are mandatory for an item to be available for ordering

It uses standard QP (Advanced Pricing) API's to populate the standard QP tables (qp_list_lines)

This Pricing data is the backbone of all the pricing capabilities in LPS For e.g. LPC , CCW, B2B applications etc.

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Item Master Set Up

Reprice Process

Final List Price

Rounding Rule

Currency Conversi

on

Factors

Base Price

B2B LPC

CCW

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Challenges In Current Design

This program is an event based program. Whenever new pricing attributes/items are set up or an existing set up is modified a change event is generated which is processed by this program.

During this process it scans various bulky tables to derive the information required to recalculate the list price and also performs the mandatory validations.

Even though there is change in only 1 attribute, this process derives all the other pricing attributes to recalculate the list price.

This consumes around 90% of the program execution time.

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New Design The new design will insert all the required pricing attribute

information and the validations from the bulky tables into a single table. This table will have a virtual column which will calculate the list price from values present in other columns (pricing attributes).

Whenever a change event is received, that information is updated in this table and no other table is scanned for pricing attributes or validations.

This new program is 90% more efficient compared to pervious statistics.

This pricing information is used by around 10 applications under pricing domain For e.g. B2B,Disti Notifications, Audit Trail, LPC etc which were independently scanning the source tables, processing them and achieving their objectives.

This single table design saved all these duplicate efforts, improved overall system performance leading to near real-time system.

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2] List Price CatalogCCW List Price Catalog is the central

repository for List Price Publication needs available for the CCW users (Cisco Partners & Internal Users).

List Price Catalog (LPC) supports the Static Price List and Historical Pricing Data Download in various formats.

Users can also look up for specific items or item families in the LPC Catalog.

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Price List History

QTC or CI Price List

Connect to CIConnect to QTC

Select Date Range

Download or View

File Format

Microsoft Excel File

Space Delimited Text File

ERP/CMRS Product Family

ERP Family CMRS Family

Select Item Category

Addition Deletion Change

Download

View

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Catalog ApplicationsPrice Publication Upstreams

ProdMktg

OPUS

Publication Process

List Price Catalog PublicationManual

Operations

PDT

Item Master

SDT ITCustomer Order Enable Flag

- Product Aavailability- Viewable on Pricing Tool

- Web Orderable Flag

PricingOps

QTC CMRS

eGenie

QTCForms

Major-Minor Headings

SW SubAttributes

*Derive*Order

EnvironmentAvailability

BOMExplosion

StageProduct

Mappings

UpdateProduct

Mappings

StageChanges

LPCAdditions/Changes

Price File Generation

Product Availabilities

Flags

OE Availability

SW Sub Attributes

Major-Minor Headings

Documentum

Service Price File

Generation

Price File Migration

PublishJob

NT Folder

Price Pub Data

Data Access - Search

Price File Access

Price File Access

Data Access - Search

CCWList Price Catalog

PricingTool

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LPC DesignThis application uses pricing information and

generates catalog for all the price lists based on certain eligibility criteria on a daily basis.

This process' SLA was to complete in less than 24 hrs but it was taking around 72 hrs.

Cisco partners were not able to view the latest pricing information required for planning stocking and ordering. Hence impacting Cisco business.

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New Design Modified the technical design to segregate the processing into logically

independent threads-Price Lists.

Implemented parallel processing for all the price lists. Currently all the price lists are processed sequentially. I created separate child processes for each price list id that can be executed in parallel.

I used Table partitioning methodology to partition the LPC table on Price List key.

Analyzed the trace, identified & tuned top SQLs by revisiting indexing using hints wherever required.

With the help of above mentioned techniques we achieved 90% gain in the performance.

The process is well within SLA now. [90% Efficiency].

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Partner Program EnrollmentProgram Platform (PPP) is a new tool

released by Cisco Systems, Inc., to launch a single platform for partners to do business with Cisco. This tool has 5 components.Partner Program Administration (PPA)Partner Program Enrollment (PPE)Partner Rebate Engine (PRE) Partner Program Intelligence (PPI) Partner Program Intelligence – Business Object

(PPI-BO)

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Partner Program EnrollmentPartner Program Enrollment (PPE) module is

a critical module which enables the Cisco partners to enroll into the various Cisco Programs.

It provides an integrated environment for partners to submit, track and manage their applications across multiple Cisco Partner Programs.

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Improvements DoneDeveloped an integrated enrollment tool that

displays all Eligible Partner Programs available for Enrollment for a particular partner.

Developed an process to automatically copy enrollments from one program to another.

This saved Manual efforts of copying the enrollments.