Price Attributes, Attribute Groups, and Price Attribute Groups: the Fundamental Building Blocks for Your Pricing Strategy With Unified Pricing in Microsoft Dynamics 365 FSCM

Whether you are starting to plan your pricing rules or want to fine-tune them, the new Pricing Management functionality in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management (FSCM) introduces great flexibility when it comes to defining a pricing strategy with an extreme level of detail. This includes offering the ability to define price differentiators that can be assigned to products, customers, and sales order information—the price attributes. 

The price attributes are the fundamental components in the building blocks of creating robust but flexible pricing procedures to meet your organization’s objectives and adapt to market dynamics independently of the pricing model to be implemented upon this foundation. 

The pricing management engine leverages the existing product attributes in Microsoft Dynamics 365 FSCM, extended to be configured as a pricing attributes. In other words, the previously existing attribute types—Currency, Date and time, etc. and their predefined fixed text list and number list of values or value range—are now available to use as a pricing determining attribute. 

How to Create a Price Attribute in Dynamics 365 FSCM

To create a price attribute, first we need to have the attribute type. Under Product information management > Setup > Categories and attributes > Attribute types, we can create the attribute type and the corresponding values or options for the attributes within the available options: 

In the attribute types page, you can configure the corresponding values for the related attributes.

Note: Attribute under attribute types Reference cannot be enabled as price attributes. 

Once you have the attribute types, we can create our price attribute under Product information management > Setup > Categories and attributes > Attributes.  

Enter the name and the corresponding attribute type, default attribute values if applicable, and remaining of desired configuration by using the relevant toggle buttons. To mark this attribute as a price attribute, the “Can be used as price attribute” toggle needs to be set to Yes. 

Now that we have our pricing attributes, we can assign these to the different products, customers, and sales orders.

Similarly to the product attributes, pricing attributes cannot be assigned directly to the items themselves but to the category hierarchy they belong to, e.g. Procurement Category. Under Procurement and sourcing > Procurement categories, find and select the corresponding category and/or category node the items are part of, the attributes can be added in the Product attributes fast tab.

In the list, find and select the desired Attributes and Click on the right-pointing arrow to Add. 

You can assign the different pricing attribute values to the Items either from the Products fast tab in the category node by clicking Product attributes, or directly from the Released product page >Product > Product attributes.

Creating Attribute Groups

In the case of the Sales orders and Customers, assigning the relevant price attributes is a little different. To do this, we need to create an Attribute group for each. 

Attribute groups serve not only to organize and group relevant price attributes together, but it’s also the mechanism that the pricing management functionality uses to define which price attributes are applicable for Customers and Sales orders.  

Now that we have our price attributes created, we can arrange them in an attribute group under Product information management > Setup > Categories and attributes > Attribute groups. In the attribute group form, we can add the corresponding attributes for the group as well as the display order.  

We can now use the attribute groups to define the corresponding price attributes eligible for the Customer and Sales order under Pricing management > Setup > Pricing management parameters > Price attribute tab > Price attribute and price tree fast tab.

Creating Price Attribute Groups 

The price attribute groups create a set of price attributes. When establishing a pricing rule, you can select a price attribute group and then specify values for each of the associated attributes. In this way, you define the match criteria that are used to select the sales orders and order lines that the rule applies to.   

There are two scopes for price attribute groups: header and line 

• Header: Attributes obtained from sales order headers and customers. 
• Line: Attributes obtained from sales order lines and products. 

Price attribute groups can be configured following Pricing management > Setup > Price attribute groups > Price attribute groups. In the Sales order matching scope field, we’ll be able to select if the price attribute group is for the Header or the Line scope and depending on the selection, we’ll have different options to select in the Price attribute source when adding the price attributes to the price attribute group. 

Header scope will offer price attribute source from customer and/or sales order information. Additionally from the price attributes we created and added to the attribute group assigned to the customer/sales order in the Pricing management parameters, there are “out of the box” fields from the customer master data and sales order header data available for selection to define pricing rules. 

Line scope will offer price attribute source from sales order lines and products information. There are also certain “out of the box” fields from the product and sales order line data available for selection as well as the price attributes created for products. 

The price attribute groups are the mechanisms that we can use to link each price component code to the corresponding price attributes. 

Now having determined the various pricing factors and knowing how to assign them to master data as well as transactional data and price component codes, we have the tools to create a more dynamic and targetable approach based on the foundation laid out by this functionality. Which, in turn, facilitates the decision to build upon the price attributes a flexible tailored pricing strategy for with suitable pricing model for the organization. 

If you have questions about developing a pricing strategy in Microsoft Dynamics 365 FSCM, please reach out to the Sikich experts for help.