Pricing Server Mediator for Multi-Supplier Cost Estimation
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Solution Overview
Problem
Businesses face challenges in providing accurate and competitive pricing estimates due to frequent changes in goods and services prices, making it difficult to maintain a profitable margin, especially in complex transactions involving multiple suppliers.
Innovation Solution
A method and system that utilize a financial application with a graphical user interface to collect and display pricing data from multiple suppliers, apply pricing rules to calculate a total estimated cost, and display this cost to customers, ensuring up-to-date pricing information and maintaining profitability.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Measurement precision
If pricing data is collected from multiple suppliers to ensure competitiveness, then the quality of pricing estimate improves, but the complexity of the system increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a pricing server as an intermediary component that collects, stores, and manages pricing data from multiple suppliers. This server acts as a mediator between the estimation system and various suppliers, centralizing the complexity of multi-seller price collection and presentation while maintaining pricing accuracy through centralized management.
Solution Approach 2:
The system segments the pricing functionality into distinct components: a pricing server for data collection and management, a financial application for estimation generation, and a graphical user interface for user interaction. This segmentation allows each component to handle specific tasks independently, reducing overall system complexity while maintaining comprehensive pricing capabilities.
2Reliability
If real-time pricing data is obtained from multiple suppliers, then the reliability of the estimate improves, but the time required to generate the estimate increases
Solution Approach 1:
The pricing server pre-collects and stores pricing data from multiple suppliers before estimation is needed. By performing the data collection action in advance and maintaining an updated database of supplier prices, the system ensures reliable real-time pricing information is available without incurring time delays during the actual estimation process.
Solution Approach 2:
The system maintains continuous updates of pricing data from suppliers through the pricing server, ensuring that the most current pricing information is always available. This continuous data refresh mechanism allows the financial application to generate reliable estimates quickly by accessing pre-updated pricing information without requiring real-time queries to each supplier.
3Reliability
If pricing rules are applied to adjust pricing data, then the profitability is maintained, but the complexity of price calculation increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent merges the pricing rule application logic into the financial application that generates estimates. By combining the data retrieval, rule application, and estimate generation functions into a single integrated application, the system maintains profitability through consistent rule enforcement while reducing calculation complexity through unified processing rather than separate calculation steps.
4Reliability
If up-to-date pricing information is collected from multiple suppliers, then the competitiveness of the estimate improves, but the quantity of data to be processed increases
Solution Approach 1:
The pricing server extracts and stores only the essential pricing information from multiple suppliers in a standardized format. By extracting only the necessary data elements (product identifiers, prices, supplier information) and storing them in a structured database, the system maintains competitive pricing capabilities while reducing the volume of raw data that needs to be processed during estimation.
Data Source
AI summary
A method for generating a pricing estimate involves displaying a graphical user interface (GUI) to obtain and display data associated with the pricing estimate, receiving items of the pricing estimate receiving a request to generate the pricing estimate, and obtaining, in response to receiving the request, pricing data for the items from a pricing server collecting pricing data from suppliers. The method further involves accessing a pricing rule relating to items of the pricing estimate, applying the pricing rule to the pricing data for the items to obtain adjusted pricing data, populating the GUI with the adjusted pricing data, calculating a total estimated cost based on adjusted pricing data and displaying the total estimated cost within the GUI.