Six Sigma for Pricing: Improving Pricing Operations To Increase Profits

“Six Sigma is well known for having helped companies save billions of dollars. This book is the first to show us how to use it on the revenue side of the equation to generate profitable growth. This step-by-step guide will be an instant classic―a seminal book on a topic critical to profitability.”

―Robert Cross, Chairman and CEO, Revenue Analytics Inc. and author of Revenue Management

“Six Sigma Pricing provides companies with a practical toolkit to improve their price management. The authors show executives how to use Six Sigma tools in their pricing processes and instantly improve profits and their bottom-line. This is a truly ‘must-have’ resource for managers everywhere.”

―Eric Mitchell, President, Professional Pricing Society

Many companies have developed solid sales strategies– but without equally good pricing operations, those strategies alone will not add a dime to the bottom line.

The goal of pricing operations is to consistently control price deviations in transactions and contracts over time and across customer segments. This goal of ensuring the prices are not too low or too high in different transactions relative to guidelines lends itself perfectly to Six Sigma. Using the authors’ breakthrough Six Sigma-based approach, you can systematically eliminate pricing-related revenue leaks, driving higher profits without alienating customers. You’ll learn how to define pricing “defects,” gather and analyze relevant pricing data, review pricing-agreement processes, identify and control failures, implement improvements, and then ensure continuous, ongoing improvement in price, profits and customer satisfaction.

The book reflects the authors’ pioneering experience implementing Six Sigma pricing. Whether you’re a business leader, strategist, manager, consultant, or Six Sigma specialist, it will help you or your client recover profits that have been slipping through the cracks in pricing operations.

•Learn why Six Sigma Pricing makes sense

    Why you should target pricing operations, and how to do it 

• Identify profit leaks from inefficient pricing operations

    Why “sloppy pricing” occurs, how to find it, and how to root it out 

• Illuminate your current pricing processes, so you can improve them

    Understand your market-facing and internally focused pricing processes pertaining to product launch and lifecycle price management, price increases due to escalation in costs of raw materials, promotions, and discounting

• Set up your pricing operations for continuous improvement in line with your pricing and sales strategy 

    Use Six Sigma to improve and control processes, ensuring alignment with agreed-upon strategy for pricing and sales

• Create an organization that is successful at pricing

    Align different functions and levels of the company to achieve targeted profits

Navdeep S. Sodhi is managing director of Six Sigma Pricing, a consulting firm based in Minneapolis and London. He has more than twelve years of global pricing experience spanning several industries: airlines, medical device, and B2B manufacturing. He has an MBA from Georgetown University. He has applied Six Sigma and Lean methods to pricing in his work for industrial manufacturers. He is the recipient of the Award of Excellence from the Professional Pricing Society. His articles on pricing have appeared in the Harvard Business Review, Quality Digest, The Pricing Advisor and the Journal of Professional Pricing. Navdeep is based in Minneapolis.

ManMohan S Sodhi is professor and head of Operations Management and Quantitative Methods at Cass Business School, City University London. Before coming to Cass, he consulted full-time for ten years at senior levels with Sabre, Accenture, and Scient in a variety of industries including chemicals, consumer-packaged goods, and airlines in the US and in Europe. His managerial articles have appeared in the Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, The Wall Street Journal, Supply Chain Management Review, and other prestigious journals. He has a Ph.D. from the Anderson School of Management at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with previous degrees in manufacturing and in industrial engineering. He is based in London.