Overview

• Product / Initiative: Centralized Pricing Environment (CPE)

• Role: Senior Product Manager – Pricing & Core Retail Systems

• Location: Chicago, USA

• Scale: 8,000+ stores, 500K+ SKUs per store, 2.2M+ items centrally

• Outcome: Delivered $20M EBIT uplift by launching a centralized pricing platform and signage application, reducing price change cycle time by 70%, and modernizing core pricing workflows across the enterprise.

Problem / Opportunity

The legacy pricing and signage processes relied on AS/400-based store systems with over 8,000 decentralized pricing engines, causing massive complexity, latency, and operational cost. Key challenges included:

• ⏳ Inefficient price change cycles: Daily updates for 500K+ SKUs per store were taking hours to process and propagate, slowing down competitive pricing actions.

• 🧱 No single source of truth for pricing, leading to discrepancies between corporate systems, stores, and POS.

• 🌐 Poor scalability to support new 99 price point strategy, which increased data volume 4x.

• 🔁 Manual signage updates and inconsistent pricing across channels, impacting margin and customer trust.

• 💰 High cost of maintaining legacy AS/400 infrastructure at scale.

Opportunity: Centralize and modernize the entire pricing engine and signage operations, enabling real-time corporate visibility, rapid execution of pricing strategies, and measurable financial impact.

Goals & Success Metrics

• Primary Goal: Build a centralized, scalable pricing platform and signage application to accelerate pricing agilityand reduce operational cost.

• North Star Metric: Price change cycle time reduction & revenue impact.

• Supporting Metrics:

  • ⏳ 70% reduction in price change cycle time

  • 💵 $20M EBIT uplift through improved pricing execution and operational savings

  • 🧭 Improved pricing accuracy and compliance

  • 📉 Network transmission volume reduction

  • 🧾 Reduction in IT maintenance cost from legacy infrastructure retirement

Targets:

• Consolidate 8,000+ pricing engines into one centralized system

• Support 2M+ items and 3K+ daily price changes per store

• Enable near real-time price propagation and signage updates

Strategy & Approach

• Defined a multi-year pricing transformation roadmap to centralize all price streams (Corporate, Market, District, substitute, Markdown, Promo, POS Integration).

• Partnered with engineering and IT architecture teams to design a central ELT-based platform using Oracle Data Integrator.

• Re-engineered the price calculation logic from store-level AS/400s to a central pricing engine with parallel processing.

• Embedded real-time data transmission via the Netman Application Interface (NAI) for store sync.

• Introduced a Store Signage Application tightly integrated with pricing data to ensure automated shelf tag and signage updates.

• Designed a four-stage rollout strategy (Initialize, Enable, Activate, Release) with built-in rollback, ensuring zero business disruption across 8,000+ stores.

• Vision: Transform pricing from a fragmented store-level function to a centralized, strategic capability enabling fast, accurate, enterprise-level pricing actions.

• Platform Modernization: Move from decentralized pricing to a single, centralized pricing engine with real-time propagation.

• Workflow Automation: Integrate pricing and signage into a unified platform to reduce manual effort and errors.

• Operational Stability: Execute rollout through controlled phases with rollback safeguards to mitigate risk.

• Scalability: Build an extensible pricing platform to support future use cases like promotions and dynamic pricing.

Frameworks Used:

• 📊 OKRs – aligned platform modernization across pricing, signage, and POS integration tracks.

• 🪜 RICE prioritization – sequenced pricing capabilities based on business impact and technical feasibility.

• 🧭 Four-stage rollout framework – Initialize, Enable, Activate, Release to ensure stable transition.

• 🧠 Capability mapping – linked pricing modernization to margin impact and operational efficiency goals.

• 🕵️ Telemetry & observability KPIs – to monitor compliance, SLA adherence, and performance.

My Role & Contributions as Senior PM

• Owned product vision and multi-year pricing modernization roadmap, driving strategy for pricing platform, signage, and store integration.

• Led and coached 4 feature PMs, covering pricing engine modernization, signage workflows, data propagation, and observability.

• Defined product strategy and prioritized high-impact capabilities, ensuring clear sequencing of modernization tracks.

• Partnered with engineering and architecture teams to design ELT-based pricing platform and central engine logic.

• Led cross-functional alignment with pricing, merchandising, store operations, finance, and IT to drive buy-in and governance.

• Established and monitored KPIs and telemetry to measure cycle time improvements, compliance rates, and operational impact.

• Oversaw phased rollout across 8,000+ stores, balancing speed, stability, and change management.

Solution & Execution

🧠 Pricing Platform Modernization

• Centralized pricing for 2.2M+ SKUs, processing 3,000+ price changes daily per store.

• Implemented price reconciliation logic and compliance dashboards for corporate visibility.

• Reduced network bandwidth usage by transmitting only final winning prices to stores.

• Decommissioned legacy AS/400 pricing engines, replacing them with a centralized pricing server on AIX.

🏪 Store Signage Application Launch

• Integrated signage app with CPE to automatically generate and update shelf tags and promotional signs.

• Ensured price-sign synchronization across POS and shelf within minutes, reducing in-store labor.

• Provided store teams with a streamlined interface for signage validation.

🧰 Technology & Integration Highlights

• Core stack: ODI 11g, Oracle 11g, UNIX, WebSphere, custom Java services, Netman Interface.

• Security: LDAP, Oracle Access Manager, Oracle Identity Manager.

• Interfaces with Revionics, POS, Advertising & Promotions, Planogram, and Inventory systems.

• Peak load support: 8,500 concurrent users, 60 TPS throughput, 6-hour batch windows for full retail refresh.

Impact & Results

• 💰 $20M EBIT uplift through faster pricing execution, margin protection, and labor savings.

• ⏳ 70% reduction in price change cycle time, from hours to minutes, across 500K+ SKUs per store.

• 🧾 Eliminated 8,000+ store-level pricing engines, cutting IT maintenance and transmission costs by ~50%.

• 📊 Improved pricing compliance and auditability with a centralized single source of truth.

• 🏪 Accelerated signage updates ensured price-tag accuracy, enhancing customer trust and reducing pricing disputes.

• 🚀 Created the foundation for future advanced pricing capabilities (promotions, real-time pricing, dynamic markdowns).

Retrospective & Learnings

• What worked:

  • Centralizing pricing and signage together enabled end-to-end automation and maximum business value.

  • A phased rollout with rollback checkpoints minimized risk for 8,000+ stores.

  • Building corporate visibility into store-level pricing reduced compliance gaps dramatically.

• What could be improved:

  • Earlier investment in observability tools could have further optimized rollout monitoring.

• Key learning:

  • Pricing modernization isn’t just a tech upgrade — it’s a strategic capability shift, enabling faster competitive response and measurable financial impact.